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InterText Vol 11 No 1
======================================
InterText Vol. 11, No. 1 / Summer 2001
======================================
Contents
FirstText...........................................Jason Snell
God-King on the Hudson.....................Ellen Terris Brenner
Keokuk...........................................Tyree Campbell
Sunset..............................................Neal Gordon
The Metal Box.......................................Tom Sheehan
Fourteen Ways of Seeing Dad..................Jonathan Alexander
The Gilding of Norm Lilly.......................T. G. Browning
....................................................................
Editor Assistant Editor
Jason Snell Geoff Duncan
<jsnell@intertext.com> <geoff@intertext.com>
....................................................................
Submissions Panelists:
John Coon, Pat D'Amico, Joe Dudley, Diane Filkorn,
R.S. James, Morten Lauritsen, Heather Timer, Jason Snell
....................................................................
Send correspondence to <editors@intertext.com>
....................................................................
InterText Vol. 11, No. 1. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is
published electronically on an irregular basis. Reproduction of
this magazine is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold
(either by itself or as part of a collection) and the entire
text of the issue remains unchanged. Copyright 2001 Jason Snell.
All stories Copyright 2001 by their respective authors. For more
information about InterText, send a message to
<info@intertext.com>. For submission guidelines, send a message
to <guidelines@intertext.com>.
....................................................................
============================
FirstText by Jason Snell
============================
Time was, I'd write a FirstText column in every issue of
InterText. Then again, when you've been doing something as long
as I've been publishing InterText, a lot changes around the
edges. We began InterText 10 years ago. It's hard to believe
it's been that long, but it's true. When Geoff Duncan and I
started working on this magazine in 1991, the Internet was so
small that we were the only fiction magazine out there that
wasn't restricting itself to science fiction.
Back then, I was a 20-year-old college student, working at the
college newspaper and (apparently) having a lot of spare time.
Since then I've gone to graduate school, gotten a full-time job,
got married, started teaching, bought a house, and plenty more.
Now I'm a 30-year-old magazine editor and university lecturer --
and in a few months, I'll be a father, too.
Fortunately, the extreme exertion that it took to produce an
issue of InterText in 1991 is gone today. Geoff and I have
gotten the creation of this magazine down to a science, and the
eagle eyes of our submissions panel have drastically reduced the
amount of time I spend wading through the numerous story
submissions we get.
A long time ago, I told myself that I would probably stop doing
InterText once Lauren and I decided to have children. And I
considered it. But then I realized two things: first, I've
slimmed down InterText to an extremely light workload in terms
of my time, so I wouldn't gain a whole lot from giving it up.
And second, I enjoy doing it, so the net result of giving it up
would be a loss, not a gain.
And so you see before you the result: InterText will continue,
if the fates allow, thanks to the work of Geoff and the
submission panel to make things run smoothly. However, I can no
longer guarantee that we'll be publishing on a regular schedule.
I've planned to release issues quarterly, but as I write this
it's been six months since our last issue hit the net. If it's
any compensation, this is one of the largest issues we've done
in a while... but six months is a long time, and in the meantime
I've received several notes from people asking if we've stopped
publishing.
I'm also going to consider alternate ways of putting out
InterText, including perhaps posting stories more regularly on
the Web site and then bundling them up into more traditional
"issues" every few months. There are advantages to such a plan,
but one big disadvantage: it will change the down-to-a-science
method we use right now. So there's no way to tell if it'll
happen.
In any event, as far as I can tell, InterText is here to stay.
When will the next issue appear? I'd like to say December, but
with a baby arriving in November, I'm not going to guarantee it.
I stopped writing these editor's notes on a regular basis
because I found I often had very little to say, beyond that
we've got some good stories for you and I hope you like them.
That, I think, can go unsaid: we picked these stories because we
liked them, and we hope that you do, too.
Now we'll start picking more. And, sometime soon, we hope you'll
see them and enjoy them as well.
Jason Snell (jsnell@intertext.com)
-------------------------------------
Jason Snell is the editor of InterText. He also edits TeeVee,
and gets paid to be the editor of Macworld. He lives in northern
California with his wife, Lauren.
<http://www.teevee.org/>
===================================================
God-King on the Hudson by Ellen Terris Brenner
===================================================
....................................................................
Just because magicians are showbiz fakers doesn't mean
there isn't magic in the world.
....................................................................
1.
----
The man in the ecru polo shirt turned, cocktail halfway to his
lips. Then he saw who, or rather what, had tapped his elbow, and
the smirk froze on his face.
The pierced and tattooed gallery crowd turned to watch his
embarrassment. I also watched, with a certain grim satisfaction.
Mr. Polo Shirt had been irritating me all evening: gawking at
my guests, ogling my photographs as if they were Times Square
porn -- even leering down my cleavage on the pretext of
admiring my tattoos. So I'd decided to have one of my costumed
performers pay him a visit -- see how he handled it when
strangeness ogled him back.
As I suspected, he could not handle it at all.
The alien creature regarded Mr. Polo Shirt out of blank glassy
fish-eyes, bulging from a huge head whose otherwise featureless
black surface merged necklessly into a pale armless torso. The
appendage that had touched him was one of two stumpy black
stalks jutting straight out from the creature's chest,
terminating in chrome-plated pincers.
The creature flexed its pectoral muscles. The pincers clacked
open and shut. Polo Shirt shrank from its touch and backed into
the wall.
I crossed through the tittering audience to Mr. Ecru. "Don't be
alarmed," I said. "It only wants some of your drink. See? Like
this."
I held out my glass of pinot grigio. The creature turned on cue
and took my glass in its right pincer. A tube-like proboscis
uncurled from a slit where its mouth should have been and sank
into the glass.
As the level in the glass fell and the creature emitted
contented sucking sounds, Polo Shirt took the opportunity to
bolt, fleeing out the door into the dubious safety of the East
Village night.
Under a burst of laughter and applause, I murmured to the
creature: "Well done. How are you doing in there?"
The surface of the head rippled gently -- inside the latex, my
performer was flexing her arms in the bonds that held them
doubled up by her ears. "Just fine," came her muffled voice. "My
boobies are beginning to get a bit sore, though."
I took the glass from her and stroked her tight-bound
"appendage" appreciatively. "You'd best go backstage, then, and
have Carlos let you out of these."
"Aw, but the bruises will look so chic when I hit the clubs
later." She waggled her proboscis at me, like a kid sticking out
her tongue. But she did turn and sidle on silver-clad legs
towards our makeshift dressing-room out back.
I watched her go, feeling let down. There was, after all, no
glory in freaking the Polo Shirts of the world.
The crowd had returned to their original activities: looking at
the pictures, at the remaining performers/creatures, at each
other, and (furtively) at me. One party-goer, however, lingered
nearby. At first glance another too-straight interloper, his
gaze was anything but furtive: a frank, burning stare out of
deep-set eyes, shaded by brows much too furrowed for such a
youthful man. But he did not gawk like the Polo Shirt boor. He
stared as if to look beneath my tattooed skin, to read a secret
I didn't know was inscribed there.
My memory stuttered that I knew him, and began to dredge up the
how and where.
He approached, extending his right hand. "Madame Vosostris. Or
should I say, Elisa Martz?"
The sound of my true name released my memory of his. "My god," I
laughed, "I haven't been called `Elisa' since I left college.
Richard Masefield, isn't it? How in the world are you? Still
studying folklore and mythology?"
As I took the offered hand, I noted that his left arm did not
have one. A stump peeked out discreetly from the neat cuffs of
shirt and sport coat. He certainly hadn't had that when we were
in school. But there _had_ been some incident about his left
hand, hadn't there? My memory now got to work on that.
"I'm fine," Richard said. "Minding the family business, same as
I was in school. And I've even found some use for the folklore
studies." We both smiled; the dubious value of a Folklore and
Mythology degree had been a running joke among the department's
undergrad majors.
"And how about you?" he continued. "Your degree doesn't seem to
have hurt your career any, from what I see. This show is
astonishing."
I glanced around at the white walls and their shots of artfully
staged atrocities. "Frankly, I didn't think you were into this
kind of thing."
"You might be mistaken about that." His tone was light, but his
eyes burned more intensely. "Remember that semester we took
`Lore and Gore' from old Sebastian?"
I found myself laughing again. "I haven't thought about it in
years. But of course I remember; you were the only other student
beside me who never once ran out retching. Even that day when
the Old Bastard started carrying on about penile subincision
rituals among the Australian aborigines."
"We were losing them right and left that day, weren't we? I
never was sure whether the old coot was indulging some Freudian
fixation, or just wanted to see all the preppies squirm. Some of
both, no doubt."
His eyelids dropped, hooding the fire halfway.
"I _am_ interested in your work, you know." His voice went low
and throaty; the fine hairs on my thighs stood up. "Very
interested. I would like you to give me a call sometime, so that
we can discuss it."
He reached inside his jacket with his one hand and produced a
card. Black engraving on cream; under the name and address was a
ceremonial knife of a style familiar to me, its wide heavy blade
more of a cross between a hatchet and a butcher's cleaver than a
knife.
"Do please call me," he said, giving me one last look. "Any
time."
He turned and slipped through the crowd and out the door.
I stood, silent amid the babel, looking at that card and feeling
my brightly-inked flesh go all to goosebumps.
Much later -- after I had helped the gallery owner lock up, made
the rounds of various private clubs, and arrived home by dawn's
smoggy light -- I sat cross-legged on my bed rubbing baby oil
into my tattoos, the 5 a.m. newscast mumbling on the TV as I
pondered Richard's reappearance.
Further memories had surfaced: one of another lecture from
Sebastian's grisly class, this one concerning those ancient
god-kings who were periodically sacrificed to insure their
people's prosperity. The Old Bastard was recounting a
particularly gory East Indian version of the regicide ritual, in
which the king mounted a silk-hung scaffold set up in the public
temple court, took up a sharp knife, and there, before all his
people, proceeded to dismember himself. Ears, nose, lips,
fingers, feet -- any and all flesh he could reach on his body --
he'd cut and fling away, baptizing the crowd with his blood,
until he became too faint to go on. At which point, with his
last strength, he'd slash his own throat.
Sebastian's face gleamed with sweat as he stalked back and forth
across the front of the lecture hall, describing this rite in
its every excruciating detail. All around me students cringed in
their seats, as if they themselves were being pelted with blood
rather than words. I, meanwhile, watched in amused detachment,
until my gaze met that of Richard Masefield, a classmate I
barely knew outside of the impersonal camaraderie of candidates
in a small obscure degree program. At which point I was no
longer detached.
Richard's eyes were literally glowing. It was as if his entire
body was in flames inside his skin, with the light escaping only
out of his eye sockets. His gaze held mine only a split-second,
then wandered around the rest of the hall. Yet even that brief
glance had left me shivering and sweating.
Eventually he turned his attention back to Sebastian, staring as
if the odious little monster were revealing the secrets of
Richard's innermost soul. I, in turn, stared at Richard. I noted
the clenched jaw, the shallow breathing, the hands clutching the
seat arms so hard the lacquered plywood should have splintered
in his grip. And that's when I spied the bandaged gap on his
left hand where his index finger should have been.
Oh yes, I recalled thinking, I had heard something about that,
an accident he had just a few days before. Some unlikely
business about a kitchen mishap. My mind jittered an uneasy joke
-- imagine Masefield, this sober-sided industrial heir, severing
his finger like Sebastian's god-king! But when I looked over at
Richard, staring at Sebastian with those balefire eyes, my mirth
faded into something more uneasy.
I snapped out of my reverie. The newscaster had just spoken
Masefield's name.
"Millionaire industrialist Richard Masefield checks into a
private hospital near his upstate New York home later this
month, according to sources close to his family," the perky
young thing was saying. "Masefield will have his left arm
amputated at the elbow, in this latest of several operations to
halt a rare bone cancer..."
As the newscaster gushed on about how Masefield's family firm
had experienced a phenomenal previous quarter even while he
endured this "latest episode in an ongoing personal tragedy," I
pulled out Richard's card.
"Bone cancer my ass," I muttered, rubbing my thumb over the
gleaming little black dagger. I dialed the number on the card.
The limo Masefield sent for me tooled northward through the
Hudson River Valley. I sprawled in torn denims on the leather
upholstery and stared out the gray-tinted window, watching the
river unwind under overcast skies.
There are many tales told about this valley, including variants
that, for understandable reasons, do not find their way into
popular books. Washington Irving, for example, retold many
quaint tales of such bogeys as the Headless Horseman of Sleepy
Hollow and Henry Hudson's ninepins-playing crew; but Irving
glossed over such details as the truth of how the horseman lost
his head, and whose bones and skulls went into making those
ninepins and balls. And these were just some of the European
contributions. The Algonquin and Mohawk had some legends that
made the worst yarns of the white interlopers seem like nursery
fables.
Such tales, of course, were not to be taken literally. Yet there
was some fire behind their smokescreen. I had seen enough in
recent years, attended (and photographed) enough rituals of
darkness and blood, to know something of that fire firsthand. A
certain energy attends such rites. Even my own tattooing
sessions had carried a little rush one could not write off to
mere endorphin release, for the effect was markedly stronger
whenever my skin received a picture of a deity.
Neither I nor those I ran with, however, fully understood how to
channel these energies. Whatever tribal chain of knowledge had
existed to guide these arts had been shattered long ago. Even
the most hardened leatherfolk I knew, even the ones who had also
trained in the occult, still had to be counted as innocents,
navigating through unknown and dangerous territories by sheer
trial and error. And I? I just took photographs, mainly, hoping
one day to capture on film whatever it was that breathed on us
and through us during those scenes.
But here now was quiet little Richard Masefield, apparently
taking these rites further, in his own quiet way, than anyone I
had ever heard of, and perhaps discovering thereby what others
could not.
The limo turned off the main highway onto a riverside road lined
with mansions. Masefield's estate was enclosed by man-high brick
walls, broken by a single oak-portaled gate. We passed within,
purred down a drive roofed over by old chestnut trees, and
halted before a rambling country house, dark and silent, built
from the local brownstone.
The chauffeur let me out and led me across cobbles to an
ivy-covered entrance-way. There he gave me over to a man in
chinos and chambray shirt, with a cherubic pink face out of
which peered eyes nearly as fierce as Richard's. He introduced
himself, in a gravelly voice, as Charles.
I glanced about, ever the photographer, as Charles led me
through the dim-lit heart of the building. Rooms clothed in
burgundy wallpaper and mahogany paneling opened to left and to
right. Through one doorway I glimpsed a massive collection of
blades. On every wall hung knives and swords of every
description -- steel, crude iron, copper, bronze, stone,
obsidian. Pride of place was given to a modestly-sized but
authentic-looking guillotine. And I thought I saw the original
version of the ceremonial knife on Richard's card.
We arrived at a surprisingly light and cheerful solarium facing
the river. There, in a white-painted Adirondack chair, sat
Richard, sipping coffee from a bone china cup only a hair more
translucent than his skin. Charles brought another cup for me as
I drew up a chair.
I sipped, then launched in without preamble. "It's all a cover
story, then -- the cancer, the private hospital?"
"No private hospital. It happens here. By my hand."
"And what is it that happens?"
He paused.
"That story Sebastian told us," he finally began. "About the
sacrificial king. It was more than just a tale to upset the
dull-minded. It was more even than the crudely powerful
symbolism of concrete-thinking `primitives.' It was, and is,
real magic, one of the few magics that continue to work reliably
even in this age."
His eyes flamed against the pallor of his face. "It works
because it uses blood -- the life force -- freely sacrificed by
a living victim. And because it's done not for one's own
self-aggrandizement, but for the good of one's people. One's
kingdom."
"Where do you come by a kingdom?"
He smiled. "What I have does count as a kingdom. There are
plenty of businesses these days with a family name still on the
logo, but the family members are usually either dead or bought
out. Mine is one of the last actively run by its family, and
it's hard to preserve -- especially when I'm the only family who
runs it. My father died while I was in elementary school. My
mother, while I was in prep school. Heart attacks, both of them.
Unconsciously, they may have been making the same bodily
sacrifices I now do deliberately. I was their only child. So,
young as I was, I picked up the burden from my fallen parents,
and have carried it ever since.
"I stumbled upon the blood magic in college, about a week before
that fateful lecture of Sebastian's. I had just gotten
devastating news about an investment -- a loss I couldn't
possibly cover, that might sink the whole works. Terrified, I
went to my dorm room to try and think, and instead fell into a
sort of trance.
"I dreamed of the king on his scaffold. He stood on the platform
and spoke to me in a serene voice, instructing me in the proper
performance of the ritual as he carved at his flesh and showered
me with his blood. The drops burned, but comforted me.
"I came to in the kitchenette on my floor, a bloody knife in my
right hand and gore spouting from my left.
"I bandaged it as best I could and phoned Security, swearing I
had done in my poor finger by accident. I had such a reputation
as a sober, responsible sort that they actually believed me. And
then the very next day, I received a phone call informing me
that another investment I had made, a long shot I had dismissed
as a tax write-off, had come through beyond my wildest
imaginings. It not only canceled out the recent loss, but my
losses for the entire quarter.
"The following week, I came into Sebastian's class, and heard
him tell the story I had dreamed.
"I went from that class straight to the library, and began what
turned into months and years of specialized study, taking me to
some very strange libraries indeed. Plus I've conducted some
further research on my own."
"And what did your research turn up?" I said, noting with
surprise that my breath was coming in short fast bursts.
"Many things. The most important being that one does not have to
go out in one Grand Guignol, like the original kings. One can
stretch out the blood-magic over any number of years,
sacrificing a member at a time. Kind of a carnal strip-tease."
He smiled, and held up the stump of his left arm. "One finger at
a time, this was, and then the entire hand."
"At about what, twenty million a finger?" I blurted, trying,
weakly, to be funny.
He smiled anyway. "I suppose I won't convince you it isn't about
the money. It _is_ about power, I'll freely admit that. It has
to be power for my kingdom's sake, or as I said it won't work.
But I reap other sorts of power as well -- power I never dreamed
existed until I started giving bits of myself away to it.
"Unfortunately," he went on, "I also discovered it weakens the
magic to use any kind of mechanical compensation." He pulled up
his right pants-leg to reveal a sophisticated-looking
prosthetic. I shook my head; I had detected not the faintest
limp in his walk. "As long as I wear this, I get almost no
effect from this amputation. It only makes sense -- it has to be
a full sacrifice."
"So that means," I said, "you can't go too much farther with
your strip-tease unless you go into seclusion."
"Exactly. But there's a paradox in that too. The magic is also
greatly weakened unless there is an audience. Remember the king
on his public scaffold?"
Every square inch of my skin began to burn, as if my tattoos had
started to writhe beneath my clothes. "That's where I come in."
"Yes. I need a documenter." His eyes sparked like witchfire. We
didn't have to speak to know we'd reached an agreement.
2.
----
"The Project," as we came to call it, had some complex
underpinnings. Richard had already put in years of preparations
-- picking staff, servants, agents, even intimates, whose
loyalty to him would remain unshakable throughout the entire
process. There were the legalities. Richard's lawyers and one of
my own choosing labored until they were dead certain my
protection from prosecution was airtight. And then there was the
matter of finding channels for discreet distribution of the
photos.
Finally, the day came when I headed up the Hudson again, this
time in my weather-beaten van, its cargo deck packed with the
equipment I would need.
The few pieces of furniture in the knife-collection room had
been removed. The carpet had been taken up also, revealing a
circle of slate set into the floor, a single unbroken slab a
good nine feet in diameter. Elaborate patterns in colored sand
decorated the rim of this circle; at its center stood a simple
wooden chair and table.
On the table rested the ceremonial knife, its blade glittering.
Richard entered, balancing himself on a crutch -- he had
abandoned the prosthetic leg now that he'd officially begun his
seclusion. He came over to give me an impersonal peck on the
cheek. He wore only a plain white caftan and looked freshly
scrubbed.
"Watch you don't smudge the sandpainting," he said, taking care
himself as he hopped over it into his inner circle. He seated
himself, laying the crutch on the floor by his side, and waited
patiently while I set up tripods, positioned lamps, took light
level readings, snapped trial shots with a Polaroid.
Finally I had all six of my Nikons properly set up on the
programmed timer, and the control clutched in my hand. I looked
at Richard sitting there, slight and vulnerable as a child, and
felt my belly quiver.
"Okay, I'm ready," I said.
"Good." His glance burned into me as he pushed up his left
sleeve and laid his already-mutilated arm on the table. His eyes
grew unfocused as his attention turned inward.
His lips began to move, at first silently. Then I heard a faint
whisper, which grew stronger until he was chanting in a low
musical murmur. I caught a few syllables of what sounded like
Sanskrit, but otherwise could make no sense of the words. The
melody was singsong, serene -- deceptively so, for as Richard
chanted on, the room began to fill with a tension that started a
cold sweat all over my body.
As I stood there, feeling chills on the backs of my knees,
Richard started to glow. With my free hand I worked my light
meter; no illusion, he really was emitting a faint halo of
light. No way to adjust for it now, I thought distractedly, my
teeth chattering as the energy in the room continued to climb.
I'd just have to pray that it didn't mess things up --
Richard took the knife in his right hand.
Suddenly there were hundreds of voices chanting along with his,
thousands, voices chanting down the millennia from times in
which their owners wielded knives of bronze, of copper, of
obsidian, of flint. My mind filled with visions of the chanting
knife-wielders, adrift across time down a river of blood and
fire, in boats of their own flesh and bone...
Richard raised the blade and held it poised over his left arm
just above the elbow. His face wore an expression of rapture.
The halo around him stood out to the borders of the sandpainted
circle, vibrating like a living thing. The chanting voices shook
the air like thunder.
The knife began to fall.
I bruised my finger mashing my control button. The cameras added
the electromechanical racket of their shutters to the din.
With a thud that sliced effortlessly through the cacophony,
Richard brought the knife straight down through flesh and bone,
and into wood.
He started -- not with pain, for he neither grimaced nor cried
out. But his head jerked back and his eyes and mouth sprang wide
open, and tongues of light like magnesium flares shot forth from
them. Blood also shot from the severed arm -- not as much as I
would have expected, but enough to splash a spray of red
directly at me. I raised my arm against it by reflex. Where the
drops spattered my bare arm they burned like acid.
I barely noticed. I had forgotten about exposures and light
levels. I had nearly forgotten my name, and Richard's. I was
standing at the edge of a circle of power summoned by a
god-king, a god-king now inhabited by something -- someone --
that was not of this world.
That Being looked at me. It was like looking into the sun. The
rest of the world vanished. I vanished.
The moment passed. The light collapsed in on itself as the
presence departed from Richard. He became a small bloodstained
figure sitting limp in his little wooden chair.
I felt pretty limp myself. The room had gone silent. My forearm
itched strangely. I looked down; the spots of Richard's blood
glittered like rubies. Somehow I knew those spots were now as
permanent as the rest of the color inked into my skin.
Gingerly I stepped over the sandpainting and knelt by Richard's
side. I cast a glance at the severed segment of arm lying in a
pool of blood on the table. _Raw meat!_ my daemonic sense of
humor tittered. I pointedly focused on Richard.
"I'm all right," he protested weakly. His eyes were slightly
unfocused, and he shivered with what I took as the beginning
stages of shock. He pulled the bloodstained sleeve up from where
it had fallen down over the new stump. I gasped -- the wound was
already closed, the stump neatly rounded off, a narrow pink seam
marking where the skin had drawn together over the exposed
muscle and bone.
He shivered again, harder.
"Let me get Charles," I said.
"No need. I'll be fine. It's just the backwash..."
On an impulse, I slipped my arms around him. His body was as
weak as ashes, and yet I could still feel the after-echoes of
the Being that had inhabited him. A wet heat started up between
my thighs. I lowered my mouth upon his.
His eyes widened. Then he began to kiss back. His tongue
explored my mouth, then grazed my jaw to follow the curve of my
throat.
Presently I scooped him up in my arms -- he was surprisingly
light, and I well-muscled from hauling my gear. His head against
my heart, I carried him up to his bedroom, where we proceeded to
kindle a more earthly kind of fire.
The cameras had captured the glow, all right. And in the
exposure right after the blade fell, one of the six cameras
captured something else. It took a good deal of digital
post-processing to pull the image out of the wash of
overexposure, and even after that all I had was a faint outline.
But what an outline.
Richard just smiled and shook his head when I showed him that
photo. He would not -- could not? -- name that Being for me. Not
that a name would have made any difference. Just to know that
the Being I had seen during the rite really existed was more
than I had ever hoped for.
Richard slid the photo of the Being back into the envelope with
the others, pulled me to him, and kissed me, and we talked no
more about the image in the photograph that day.
That week, Richard's business earnings shot into the billions.
For the next ten years, I drove that route up the Hudson River
valley, in every season and weather. I would turn down that lane
to the estate by the river -- that macabre burlesque on
Versailles, complete with its own twilight Sun King, a ruler
whose interior fire burned only more fiercely the more his flesh
dwindled.
Not every visit was to document a ritual. Oftentimes Richard
would entertain the small circle who were in on his little
project. A bizarre lot we were. I suspect that under other
circumstances I would have chosen to avoid at least a couple of
them, and that a few of them felt the same about me. But over
the years we drew together with a loyalty almost as bizarre as
the secret which inspired it. We'd gather to pay court to our
netherworld god-king, I bearing the unique double role of Royal
Chronicler and paramour, which honor I wore like the growing
number of ruby drops amongst my tattoos.
It was so easy sometimes to pretend that this could go on
forever, and out of respect for our king we never questioned
this pretense openly. But I remember one gathering during the
seventh year, otherwise no more remarkable than any of our other
odd meetings, when the reality struck home for me.
It was just past the peak of summer, when the first trees begin
to turn to flame and the nights to turn chill with frost. A knot
of us strange companions were gathered to sip wine as the sun
dropped behind the mountains. Charles carried Richard down from
the house. We stood by respectfully as the servant propped him
up in one of the Adirondack chairs he so loved, tucked a
lap-robe around the stumps of his thighs, and withdrew.
Someone placed a glass of wine in Richard's hand, and we took
turns describing the sunset to him. He smiled, the ruddy glare
lighting up his gaunt-grown face. For a moment I thought I saw,
in the vacant sockets where his eyes had once shone, that other
light that had only continued to grow stronger with my every
photo of his rituals.
Charles came out onto the veranda to ring the bell for dinner.
Gregor claimed the honor of carrying Richard back up to the
house. The rest of us trailed behind, and I wound up bringing up
the rear with Unia.
As usual, she was already loaded. "So," she asked me, trying and
failing to sound as if her question was spontaneous and
unplanned, "how do you think it's going to end?"
"I beg your pardon?" I said stiffly.
"Come now," she said, her tongue darting out unpleasantly to
lick her upper lip. "You know what I mean. Not to be crude about
it, but our fearless leader hasn't too many more parts left to
spare. I suppose he could start working on his remaining arm by
way of his guillotine. Or he might resort to cutting off his
nose despite his face -- ha! And then what? I presume his cock
is still eligible, since you and he continue to have relations
-- "
"If you hadn't had so much to drink, Unia, you'd remember my
photos of that particular sacrifice." I kept my voice light, but
shot her a glare to singe her brassy blonde hair.
She reddened. "Was just a joke, can't you take a joke?" she
mumbled.
I glimpsed the genuine grief and fear hiding behind her tactless
attempt at humor, and relented. We walked the rest of the way in
silence.
Later that night, after the others had left, I climbed into bed,
wrapped my arms around Richard, and was mortified to find myself
bursting into tears.
"Hush," he said, pressing my head against his chest with his one
arm. He held me there for some time, stroking my hair while I
finished crying.
"Don't you know," he said at last, "that you will never lose me
now?"
"You're going to die," I blurted stupidly, tears welling again.
Emotions played across his face. "Yes. I will die. I will kill
myself. But I will not be gone and done with. You know this to
be true."
I ran my free hand over his mutilated flesh, feeling that
familiar heat between my thighs. How little Unia understood. "I
will miss this body," I said.
He sighed, his face pointing at the ceiling. In the darkness,
the caverns of his eye sockets began to emit a glow, and I knew
he was seeing... something.
"I will miss it, and be glad to be rid of it both," he said.
"But come." He turned his head to find my lips with his. "We are
wasting precious time. Which, as you have rightly pointed out, I
have not much more of."
Later that night I dreamed of the Being, the phantasm I had
continued to capture from time to time in my photos of Richard,
though never more than in outline. I could not fully make him
out in my dreams, either, but his terrifying presence was still
a comfort.
That last night, winter of the tenth year:
I drove the valley alone, in my van, under a full moon. There
had been an ice storm that day, and every twig of every tree was
encased in a crystal-clear sheath, so beautiful in the
moonlight, so deadly to the trees. The wind blew; the tree-limbs
glittered and tinkled, a thousand ice-sheaths shattering with
each motion. Every now and then a crack like a rifle report
heralded the snapping of an overstressed limb.
The mansion was deserted, as Richard had ordered. I let myself
in with my key, and made my way down the now-familiar hall,
camera-bag slung over my shoulder. He waited for me in the
solarium, where Charles had left him before he, too, departed.
Limbless, sightless, nearly featureless, he sat propped up in
the Adirondack chair, listening to the night wind, the chiming
and clattering of the trees.
I kissed him, my tongue caressing his vacant mouth. When I
pulled back, I saw the flames leaping in both empty eye-sockets.
"You don't have to go through with this, you know," I said.
He smiled, a death's-head grin. "Perhaps I never had to go
through with any of it in the first place," he said, laboring
carefully over the sounds. He'd taught himself to speak with
lips alone, substituting for the sounds he could no longer make
for lack of a tongue, and we in his circle had learned to
understand him. "I could have let the family fortune fail," he
said. "But as I said from the beginning, it never was about the
money."
"I know." I picked him up, pressing his body against mine, and
carried him to the hall of knives. The guillotine stood in the
center of the sand-painted stone circle, a cot set up before it.
I laid him on his back on the cot, positioned his head and neck
correctly, and turned my attention to my cameras. When every
last tripod and light and timer was in place, and the shutter
control switch rigged to respond to the drop of the blade, I
came back to his side one last time.
He smiled, accepted one last kiss, then opened his mouth for me
to put the guillotine's pull-cord between his teeth.
Twenty minutes later, driving south along the highway, the river
below an iron ribbon under the moon, I felt something strike me
like a blow to the solar plexus. I barely managed to pull off to
the shoulder. Clinging to the steering wheel, gasping for
breath, I knew: the blade had fallen on Richard's flesh for the
last time.
I looked up then. The moon had gone rust-red, and the river
below to scarlet. A huge wavering figure came striding over the
crest of the hill, only vaguely human-shaped, glowing like
flame, walking at an impossible speed. It was the phantasm from
my photos, contained within Richard all these years, free to
fully manifest at last.
It vanished for awhile into the shadows under the tinkling
trees, then reappeared by the river's edge. I saw motion on the
water: a boat, blood-red and bone-white, moving on the water
oblivious to the current, no oar or sail to propel her. The boat
bore down on the shore, headed for the Being of flame. He waded
out to meet it in the river of blood.
Just before boarding, the Being turned, as if toward me. It
raised a hand, whether in greeting or farewell I did not know.
"Goodbye, Richard," I said, the tears sliding freely down my
face. "I'll see you in my dreams...?"
The Being nodded, as if hearing and answering my question. The
ruby drops burned on my body.
He boarded the boat, and it was off again, bearing its passenger
away at a speed as unlikely as the Being's gait. Mist began to
gather on the river, like curdles of steam on the surface of the
blood. For a moment many more boats were out there, slipping
into and out of the mist, all carrying strange passengers on
their bloody decks.
Then the mist swallowed all, and when it blew clear again the
boats had vanished and the river had washed out to its normal
gray.
The trees tinkled like tolling bells as I pulled back onto the
highway. A huge and comforting presence enfolded me as I
continued on south to the city.
Ellen Terris Brenner (mizducky@drizzle.com)
---------------------------------------------
Ellen Terris Brenner lives, works, plays, and writes in Seattle,
WA. She is an alumna of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and
has published a number of short stories and essays, including
several pieces in InterText. By day she geeks at a large
software company; by night she lollygags around the Internet and
works on more stories.
<http://www.drizzle.com/~mizducky/>
Other InterText stories by Ellen Terris Brenner: "Home" (v4n1),
"Gone" (v6n2), and "The Mirror of Aelitz" (v7n2).
============================
Keokuk by Tyree Campbell
============================
....................................................................
One argument against the death penalty is that it's cheaper to
give someone a life sentence than to execute them. Well, in most
cases.
....................................................................
The young man pitched the I.D. into the open transfer tray,
spoke his name -- Jojon Rillard -- and doffed his yellow plastic
helmet to present a better view of his face, trying not to be
intimidated by the twenty-foot concrete stockade. "I'm here to
pick up my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-
grandfather."
The guard levered the tray to his side of the window and
examined both the I.D. and Rillard, daring a characteristic to
differ. His sigh signified failure. "I can't let you in. Maximum
security, you know." There was a metallic reverberation as he
punctuated the statement with a whack of his zapper against the
chain-link fence that enclosed the sally port. "'sides,
technically you're not a visitor."
Rillard shrugged. He had anticipated "technical" impediments:
delays, interviews, data templates to complete, background
minutiae to disclose, ultimately their resort to the letter of
regulation. Not that he wanted to enter the Carnation Center for
Ultra-Maximum Security -- who would? But he didn't want to wait
outside in the Iowa sun while the security guard enjoyed the
relative comfort of shade, either -- who would?
Curious that the guard didn't ask for the name of his
Gee-to-the-eighth grandfather. Surely some obscure statute
required you to know precisely whom you were picking up, even if
there were no one else it could be.
Wind stuttered, and a dust devil sieved through the chain-link.
Rillard shut his eyes and held his breath. Grit hissed against
the shatterproof window and ricocheted onto his blue leather
outsuit, catching in the fibers of the collar-to-crotch ventral
seal. It also blew up his nose. Rillard turned his face away and
sneezed. The barren panorama fluttered like a monitor with a
dying solar cell, then bounced back into focus. Half a mile to
the north sprawled Verdania, a malchristening if ever there were
one, neatly laid out by protractor and laser compass, aligned
longitudinally to minimize overhead sunlight, not a single tree
visible above the Sumerian mosaic of tangerine-tiled roofs.
Beyond Verdania squatted the mininuke temple, beside it rose the
exhaust ziggurat. Rillard could almost hear the steady
mechanical whine of power feeding the air coolers and the
fridges and stoves and culinary paraphernalia and God-knew
what-all in the town built to support the Carnation Center and
the incarceration of Clyde Ahmed Bedess Washington, Junior.
"He's dangerous, you know," said the guard. "And incorrigible."
Cab Washington had refused to register for a military draft or
to kill Indochinese natives in a spat du jour. Instead, he had
killed the two police officers dispatched to arrest him for
refusing to kill Indochinese natives. The powers that be in
Dallas, a predeluvian hotbed of death penalty passions, had
elected to blunt protest marches and a shutdown of sanitation
and janitorial services by suggesting to the prosecuting
attorney that a prolonged incarceration would in this instance
be acceptable, to say nothing of prudent. Cab Washington had
been sentenced to 360 years in prison on each of two counts of
murder of a police officer, terms to run consecutively, with
time off for good behavior (chortle), one good day worth two
days of sentence (snicker).
"He's served his time," said Rillard.
"He should have died. He was supposed to die."
"Then you should have imposed the death penalty."
"I just work here, Mister."
You and fifty others. The warden. The sergeant of the guard. The
guards in the corner towers he'd seen while flying over the
rammed-dirt road in the black skimmer with the yellow speed
detailing and the kayak-shaped sidecar, now docked ten yards
away in the vast but otherwise empty lot. The armorer for the
weapons the guards carried. Guard shifts, working in pairs.
Maybe a roving pair on the parapets, if the stockade had
parapets. Someone to run the cafeteria, someone to serve the
food, someone to clean up. Laundry, cleaning, maintenance and
repair, transportation to and from Verdania for each shift,
someone to operate the transport, someone to maintain it.
Medical, dental, recreational, educational, nutritional.
You and a hundred and fifty others.
Wives, partners, children. Schools, teachers, nurses, student
advisors, administrators. Grocery stores, grocers, clerks,
deliveries, loaders. Pharmacies, pharmacists and assistants,
more clerks. Furniture stores, and more clerks. Accountants,
managers, assistant managers, recyclers. communications
operation and maintenance, plumbers, electricians, solaricians,
sheet-metal technicians for the air ducts and the radioabsorbent
siding.
You and three hundred others. All utterly dependent on the
lingering incarceration of Clyde Ahmed Bedess Washington,
Junior, and the remuneration for the work and services performed
pursuant thereto.
"They said you was the only one left," said the guard. "Last
living relative."
"Where is he?"
"He'll be here." The guard, paused, drummed fingers, leaned his
chair against the rear of the enclosure, squinted. "Think you
inherited whatever it is he's got?"
The Washington name had died out five greats ago. But Canduca
Washington had accommodated a vibro-artist named Xu Chali, and
the issue from that evening eventually had taken up with Jayar
Rillard. There'd been a lot of that going around, five greats
ago. Whenever possible, survivors intermingled, because you
never knew when you would get to intermingle again. Decades of
planet-wide meteorological warfare and abuse will engender such
uncertainties... but, then, peoples tend to react badly when
their coastlines are inundated. Those who have coastlines. And
those about to get them.
Rillard shrugged.
"How'd they find you, if you don't mind my asking?"
"DNA trace. Apparently I had enough to qualify as a
next-of-kin."
"That's how they _identified_ you."
Rillard jerked his head toward the skimmer. The movement
dislodged a bead of sweat, launching it off the tip of his nose.
"In that I get known. Someone zapped my comm."
"You're a runner."
"From here to there. It pays."
"Run contraband?"
_Everybody runs contraband. That's where the money is._
"No."
Movement in the vague ochre sky to the south caught Rillard's
eye. Seabirds, he reckoned, drifting north with the
high-pressure system that scared the clouds off but not the
ubiquitous haze. Whenever the breezes died, you could catch the
faintest whiff of brine and decomposition from the Ouachita
Islands in the Bay of Louisiarka. Surf fishing between the Bay
and Keokuk Harbor was good this time of year, and he had been on
his way there when the comm flashed across the datascreen on the
skimmer instrumentation console. The false bottom in his sidecar
contained eight fresh artichokes, to be delivered discreetly to
the back door of the Life Mayor of Keokuk, whose partner had
acquired a taste for them during a vacation to Fresno Beach. In
exchange, he was guaranteed food and lodging to the end of the
snook season, and a permit to fish them. Something he did
because... well, _just because_. What other reason could there
be? The detour to the Carnation Center cost him but two hours,
easily made up. But he had assumed Cab Washington would be ready
to go.
The guard's squint seemed a permanent affectation. "He know
you?"
"I don't know. I don't think so."
"Why d'you suppose he lived so long?"
Why, indeed? For spite? Some old folks hung on just to watch the
heir-expectants fidget. Some ripped the shroud off the Grim
Reaper and played his ribs like a xylophone. Others simply gave
up. What made a person want to live? To go on living? Especially
nowadays.
Force of habit? The momentum of life?
"Maybe he thought it was funny," said Rillard, plucking at the
damp fabric under his armpits, "the way it cost so much just to
keep one man locked up forever. When I leave with him, this
place will die, like an industry town whose company moves
elsewhere. Like the sunken coal mines in the Appalachian
Archipelago. Maybe it amused him to keep you occupied."
_Whatever will you do, Rhett? Wherever shall you go?_
"He was guilty, you know."
"After 273 years, who gives a fuck?"
"It was The Law put him here."
"And you."
"What's that s'posed to mean?"
"You need Cab Washingtons a lot more than they need you."
The guard pulled at his lower lip. "What're you going to do with
him?"
"He's not on parole, or probation. He's free. He can do what he
wants." Rillard looked away, at the haze and the seabirds.
Already he could smell the snook and the smelt in the ancient
iron skillet, hear the sizzle of the hot oil on the open fire,
feel the sand between his toes. Maybe his Gee-eighth ancestor
understood what it meant to be alone with your thoughts, your
memories, your reveries, by a solitary fire on a dark beach.
Maybe the incorrigible Cab Washington just wanted to go fishing.
He could, now. He could do whatever he wanted.
"There he comes," said the guard.
Rillard couldn't look. How many wrinkles did Methuselah have? Or
any of the Biblical patriarchs who lived to ages old and ripe?
He sniffed, but the breeze deflected whatever fetid aromas
emanated from the man. He flicked his eyes there, and away. A
glimpse of a very black man, like an old pygmy, stooped of
shoulder and hobbled of gait, pate agleam, attired in cafeteria
whites and scarred brown slippers. Smiling.
He looked again, longer.
Not exactly a smile. Almost a smirk. But the weariness of the
rest of his expression said the victory included a terrible
cost.
In his knobby left hand Cab Washington carried a sheaf of
documents. Rillard reckoned they pertained to his new status.
The old man did not so much as glance at the guard as he passed.
He gimped toward the black and yellow skimmer as if he knew it
was waiting for him. He spilled himself into the sidecar, and
finally looked back over his shoulder. Let's go, young'un.
Rillard's neck creaked with the effort the old man made.
With a parting wave at the guard, Rillard boarded up the
skimmer, initialized power and controls, and eased her out of
the docklot.
"Put this on," said Rillard, passing the old man a battered
orange helmet.
Cab Washington gave no indication that he had heard, or had
noticed the helmet. He stared straight ahead, at the dead-brown
roadway over which the skimmer passed without touching, at the
eastern horizon where orange land met orange sky. With the sun
behind them, they seemed to rocket directly into their own
shadows.
"We off the grounds yet?"
The words startled Rillard into five seconds of silence.
"I reckon so."
"Thank God Almighty," cried Washington, in a fluid, prolonged
gospel tone, and died.
Rillard slowed the skimmer. In and of themselves the words meant
nothing to him, but in that tone they became a last will and
testament. Gently he nestled the helmet on Washington's lolling
head, and gradually reaccelerated the skimmer toward Keokuk
Harbor.
"Let's go fishing," he whispered.
Tyree Campbell (thairee13@worldnet.att.net)
----------------------------------------------
Tyree Campbell is a retired U.S. Army translator. His first SF
e-novel, Nyx, will be released in 2001, and his second, The Dog
At The Foot Of The Bed, is scheduled for release early in 2002.
At present he is collaborating on an illustrated fantasy novel.
When he is not writing, he is thinking about writing. Otherwise,
he and Beth tend pets and plants and each other.
=========================
Sunset by Neal Gordon
=========================
....................................................................
This is a story about four people. Two are present. Two are not.
....................................................................
Two clear plastic bags hang from the rafter at the far end of
the cabana. Half filled with liquid, they sway in the salt sea
air. Red twine snakes around the rough log rafter, sealing each
bag and holding it in place.
Ray motions to the waiter and points, "What are they?"
The waiter, an older man, not like the usual young cabana boys
that served his food, looks at Ray for a moment. "Habla
espanol?"
"Un pequito. Barely," Ray says and takes a sip from the cold
bottle.
Slowly, the waiter says in broken English, "They are not the
friends of the mosquitoes."
"What's inside?"
"Vinegar and water. Cerveza, senor?"
"No. La quenta. The check, just the check," Ray says and reaches
for the roll of colorful money he got in exchange for his bland
green dollars at the hotel desk. It would be easy enough to sit
here and get plastered. The sun on the water and the pink and
white tourists around him are comforting: their voices a
sing-song of accents from across the ocean. Ray laughs as a
small blonde boy finishes a sand castle and then stands, raises
his arms Frankenstein-like, and crushes his own work. The action
is so simple and clear that he feels a lump rise in his throat.
He has to shake his head to clear the moment.
Ray steps into his shoes and, feeling his skin suddenly crinkly,
slowly stands. He sees Julia, lying in the crowd around the
water's edge, stomach down on the yellow beach towel, her red
hair pulled back in a knot. Ray stares at her as the waiter
brings the check and lays it on the table. Her shoulders glare
with oil, and her black suit looks impossibly dark against her
still-white skin. She's going to get torched, he thinks.
Ray looks at the check and peels off a twenty, converting back
to dollars in his head. "Three bucks," he says out loud. Two
beers, chips and guacamole. No wonder everyone here is poor.
They could charge ten at home, easy.
Ray goes and sits down on a plastic beach chair with his hand on
the front of his neck. As he has done a thousand times, he
touches the small hard lump there without thinking. The small
lump has always been there, one of a spare pair of ribs.
Contorted to be sure, they are not smooth and even like their
well formed siblings. One rib, the one he fingers now, points
out above his collar bone, as if trying to grow out of his neck,
like a creeping ivy searching for the sunlight. Its twin rises
briefly then turns back into him, into the shadows of his
interior. He does not know where it ends. The times when he is
conscious of his action, he thinks of them like tea leaves,
waiting to be read in the bottom of a cup, predicting his past
and future.
Julia turns her head to him and the wisps of her hair touch the
sand. Ray cannot help but notice how the sun has made her hair's
red seem more yellow this past week. "What's going on down
there?" she asks, sitting up and pointing past him down the
beach. He turns and looks to where a crowd is gathering around a
lump in the sand. People run toward the crowd, hurrying.
"Looks like a fight, maybe. All of these college kids," Ray says
lifting his head. He wishes once again that he had thought twice
about traveling here this time of year, when there seem to be
young people and families everywhere.
"Go down and see," she says, shielding her eyes to see.
"Fine," he says, getting up. The sand is hot in Mexico, he
thinks as it sticks to his feet like tar. It is formed from tiny
pieces of shell, unlike the sand he is used to back in New
Jersey.
A hundred yards down, he can see that it is definitely not a
brawl: the crowd isn't moving. He quickens his step and between
the legs of the gapers he sees a large, dark colored something
on the beach.
When he is within ten yards of the crowd, he recognizes the
something as the body of a man. A group of young men are doing
CPR. The man's body has gone sort of purple-gray, a color Ray
recalls too vividly from a year ago when he looked at his
stillborn son in the delivery room.
Without taking another step forward, Ray turns and begins to
walk back up the beach. The last thing he wants to do is look at
a dead body. He shakes his head to stop his mind from thinking
of that color.
"What is it?" Julia calls when he gets close enough that she can
yell over the surf.
"Dead guy."
"That's terrible," she says, sitting up.
"Big fat gray dead guy."
"Are you sure he's dead?"
"They're doing CPR on him, but no way. He's dead."
He sits down and looks at her. She is beginning to cry, he sees.
It is one of the moments where he feels the least like a man,
least like he can do anything about what happened. He puts a
hand on her back.
"It's so sad," she says. "He's probably here on vacation."
"Goes without saying," he says looking down at his sand covered
feet. God, the sand sticks to everything. He looks at the water
rolling onto the beach, a green blue color he doesn't naturally
associate with the ocean. But, he thinks, he could get used to
it. The waves roll up, dark blue, then begin to swell, a lighter
blue, then almost emerald green as they break and roll up on the
yellow sand. Julia's hitching stops under his hand and he knows
the moment has passed for her.
"I am definitely taking that class at the Y when we get back."
"Class?"
"CPR. Can you imagine?"
"Dying on vacation? There are worse places."
"No, for whomever he's with. Can you imagine what a nightmare
they're vacation has just become?"
"Hadn't thought about it," he says thinking that the guy looked
too young to be married and way too fat to have a girlfriend.
"What if they're alone here? Having to handle all of the details
in a foreign language?"
"I'm sure some diplomat will come."
"So sad."
"Let's go inside. The sun is killing me."
"Ray," she says looking at him.
Ray feels his stomach roll over again, like the waves. A moment
passes and Ray feels in that moment the conversation between
them that is not said about a baby that he wants but she will
not have. But this time Julia laughs, and everything is okay
again. "Sorry. I didn't mean that," he laughs and bends over to
pick up his towel and the bottles of sunscreen and water.
When he opens the door to the hotel room, he is struck by the
cool dryness of the room. The air conditioner makes such a
difference in this heat, he thinks. "I'm going to rinse off this
sand," he says and steps into the bathroom. He hears the sliding
door open to the deck and turns on the shower to get the water
right.
The shower is cool, and he feels a quick chill and a bit of
lightheadedness that quickly passes along with some blue fuzzy
places in his vision. A hand on the solid marble wall helps, and
in a moment he is fine, lathering. His skin feels tender to his
touch, as if he was having an allergic reaction. Turning off the
tap, he steps in front of the mirror and sees that he has gotten
too much sun.
"I'm burned," he calls, but he hears the ocean through the glass
door and can feel the humidity from outside in the few moments
since they came into the room. He steps out into the room and
says loudly, "Close the door, you're letting the air out."
"God, am I as burned as you?" Julia says turning back into the
room, and pulling the door closed.
"That bad? I wore sunblock."
"Sunscreen, more likely. Which bottle did you use?"
"The blue one in my towel."
"That's only SPF 4. You should have worn at least 20. You'll be
sore later."
"What should I do? Take some ibuprofen?"
"I don't think it would hurt. Drink some water. Do you still
want to go out tonight?"
"It's not that bad, is it?
"No, I guess not, if you don't think so."
"It's just a sunburn."
"If you say so. I'm going to get cleaned off."
He pulls back the bedcover and lies down on the cool white
sheets. They feel amazing against his skin: cold. But he can
feel that some parts of his body, his upper arms, the backs of
his knees, the webbing between his fingers, feel swollen and
stiff. When he rolls over to take a sip of water, the sheets
stick. The sensation is like he's being peeled out of his skin.
"Jesus," he says aloud, laying back. He can feel the heat
radiating from his naked body.
Listening to the shower in the next room, Ray thinks about the
dead man on the beach. Surely his body was cold by the time they
got him onto the sand. Not cold, he corrects himself, just not
warm enough.
"Are there any beers left in the refrigerator?" she asks when
she comes out of the bath, a white towel wrapped around her.
"I think so. You want one?"
"Please."
He grimaces as he gets up, but when he picks up the beer bottle,
its coldness convinces him to have one as well.
"God, you're almost purple," she says when he walks into the
bathroom. He is pretty shocked by his reflection in the mirror.
The white band of his privates is shocking compared to the red
of the rest of him. Beet-red, make that.
"You're burned too."
"Not anything like you, sweetie," she says. "Can you open that?
I can't manage it."
He twists off the beer bottle top and hands it back to her. In
turning to take it, the towel around her and falls to the floor.
There is a silence.
"Want me to put some lotion on your back?" he says in what is
his most normal voice.
"Please," she says and hands him the bottle from the counter
while pulling her hair forward over her shoulder.
He squeezes the lotion into his hand, puts the bottle down and
begins to spread it on her back when she pulls away. "Sorry,"
"It's just cold," she says.
He stops and rubs his hands together and then goes back to
spreading it on her bare back. He feels her push back against
him and looks into the mirror to see that she has closed her
eyes. Her skin is smooth and warm and the lotion turns thin and
begins to absorb. When he is finished, his hands feel greasy and
he goes to the sink to rinse them. When he returns, she has not
moved. He lies down next to her and she turns her face to him and her
eyes open as she smiles. She makes a noise and closes her eyes
again, leaning in and kissing him. He touches her and in a few
moments she is pulling him toward her, but he can't. He closes
his eyes when she looks at him.
He rolls away from her, stands and pulls on a pair of shorts.
"I'm going down to the front desk to ask about a good restaurant
in the city," he says.
"Are you okay," she asks.
"Yes, perfectly. Just sunburned," he says and pulls on a shirt.
The cotton feels like sandpaper.
"Maybe later?"
"Absolutely."
"Buy money," she says and smiles and begins to dry her hair with
the towel.
In the lobby, people mill about and Ray goes to the concierge
desk by the front door.
"Hay un buen restaurante?"
In Ray's mind, the words are converted slowly to English. We
have a fine restaurant, sir.
"No... En la ciudad?"
There are many. Try Ricardio's. Understand?
"Entiendo. Usted necesita un coche conseguir alli?"
Certainly, a taxi for you.
"Bueno. Sobre una hora. Puedo cambiar el dinero aqui?"
7.5 to one.
Ray takes two fifties from his wallet and the man hands him a
pile of bills in bright colors.
"Gracias."
In the room, she is dressed and sitting on the edge of the bed
wearing a blue sundress with a white shirt beneath. Her perfume
fills the air. "You look great."
"Any luck with the concierge?"
"I got a name of a restaurant in the town. There are taxis out
front. Andiamo al barre?"
"Italian? The bar? Not just yet. We need to talk."
"No, we don't. Let's just go have a drink and not talk."
"I need to understand what is happening, Ray."
"Nothing is happening. We're on vacation."
"You feel far away."
"I'm just thinking about things."
"What kind of things."
"I'm just thinking about me."
"Without me?"
"No, it's not like that."
"Well, what is it like?"
"It's not important. I'm just trying to understand what kind of
person I am."
"What kind of person are you?"
"I knew you were going to ask that."
"Well, you spend so much time thinking about yourself. You are
so self-involved. It's very hard to be around you when you're
like this."
"Look, you know how you're always saying how self-involved I am?
Is it better to be self-involved and think about yourself or is
it better to sit around and gossip about everyone else and think
about their lives?"
"I don't do that."
"I'm not saying you do. I'm just saying that's what I get all
day at the office. Who fucked who and who shit on who and what
they are going to do to who, ad nauseam."
"They're just talking to talk."
"And I'm just thinking to think. Is that okay?"
"Look, I was just trying to see what was bothering you. Now it
seems it's me bothering you."
"You're not bothering me. I'm just a little withdrawn right now.
I'll be better in a drink or two."
"Then let's go."
In the elevator stand a young boy and his father. The boy is
gorgeous, brown hair and freckles. "Dad, how come my pants won't
stay up?" he says, one hand on his green corduroy pants. Ray
feels Julia chuckle. How can the kid be wearing corduroy? It
must be 85 degrees in the shade. Kids.
"Because you don't have a belt, kiddo."
For a moment, there is only the sound of the elevator clicking
past each floor. "I do too have a belt," the boy says and pulls
at one of his belt loops to show his father.
"No, that's a belt loop. See this is the belt," the man says
pointing to his own.
"Can I have yours?" the boy asks. Ray can't help but laugh out
loud. The boy looks at Ray, and then turns face in toward his
father, embarrassed. Ray feels the momentum of the elevator slow
into that moment when everything feels heavier than it is.
"Too big, kiddo. We'll get you one, okay?"
In an almost whisper as the doors open, the boy says, "No. It's
okay."
Ray and Julia walk toward the hotel bar, through the marble
tiled lobby, toward the ocean. Ray laughs and lifts two fingers
to the bartender, and says "Dos margaritas, por favor." The dark
skinned man smiles and dips his head toward his work.
On the porch of the building, the sun feels warm and Ray moves
to sit in the shade of the giant umbrella. Without thinking, he
takes her hand and looks into her face. A smile spreads across
her lips, her eyes closed and he feels her squeeze his hand. The
waiter breaks the mood with the drinks.
"On the room?" he asks.
"Si, gracias," Ray says. The sun dips below the edge of the
umbrella and Ray slides his chair back a bit further into the
shade.
"Cute boy," Julia says.
"Yes, he was. Very," he says taking a sip of the sugary drink.
"How do you feel when you see children?" he asks and leans
forward into the sunlight to see her eyes. With one hand he
shades his forehead.
"I used to not be able to look at them. Now it's not so bad. How
about you?"
"The same, mostly," he says and leans back. The time is not
right.
"Can we talk about what happened in the hotel room?"
"Talking about it won't help." Ray watches as a young girl tries
to walk down the slippery steps in swim fins.
"Yes, talking always helps."
No. It doesn't. It just makes me more aware of it. Look, if
there's one problem in the world that I don't want to think
about, it's this one. Thinking about it makes me even more
self-conscious, which makes it more likely. Okay. Let's not talk
about it.
The little girl holds the handrail, but he can see how unsteady
she is.
"Is it the baby?" It's the first time that she's said anything
this direct and he is speechless. "Or is there something else?"
"No. There's nothing else," he says. He watches as the girl
begins to slip and he jerks to his feet instinctively. From the
corner of his vision, a woman on the beach stands just as he
does.
"Did you plan on a place with so many kids?" Julia asks, putting
a hand on his and directing him back to his chair.
"No."
From the taxi, Ray watches as they pass through vendor-lined
streets. Cheap white fluorescent light gives the evening a
sterile green glow. The further they drive, the dimmer the light
becomes. There are far more shops than shoppers, as the
Americans stand out so clearly from the locals. Beggars wait on
the corners, cups out. Peddlers hawk goods to each passing
customer.
Finally the taxi leaves the brightly lit market area and travels
through dark streets until it comes to a brightly lit open air
restaurant. The taxi pulls to a stop and the driver reaches back
and flips open the door. "Costa," Ray starts, but the driver
turns and says, "After, I take you home, senor."
"You're going to wait?"
"Same price one way or both. I eat here."
"Oh," Ray says and crawls out of the back seat.
The restaurant is cement floored, with red-linoleum-topped
tables and chrome-legged chairs. Music plays and families laugh
and talk. The taxi driver sits at the low counter and seems to
know everyone. Ray and Julia sit at an open table near the
kitchen. Kids run wild through the place.
"Menus?" an old woman calls from behind the counter.
"Gracias, si."
"Cerveza?"
"Dos," Ray says, looking at Julia, who nods.
The old woman smiles as she waddles over to the table with two
bottles of Sol, two glasses, half a lime and two sheets of
paper. "Thanks," Julia says. The woman squeezes the lime into
the glasses, and pours the frothy beer.
"The menu looks great. How's the mole?"
"You need to eat more than that," the woman says.
"What else is good?"
"Everything is good, but the rellenos are very popular with the
sunburned gringos." She laughs and puts a hand on Ray's
shoulder. "How is it that she is rojo, and you are the fire?"
"She's smarter than I am."
"Your English is terrific," Julia says.
"I'll tell you a secret. Everyone on the island speaks English.
They are just stubborn about it."
"Aren't you?"
"I am the most stubborn of all. I insist that everyone is
comfortable here."
"We heard you were the best restaurant in town,"
"You must be staying at the new hotel."
"How did you know?"
"My oldest is at the desk there. He sends everyone to us."
"But you are the best, right?"
"My son is no liar," she says.
"What should I try?" Ray asks.
The woman takes the menus from them, looks at Ray a moment and
says, "Sunscreen, gringo. Sunscreen," as she walks back to the
kitchen.
When the food comes, first spicy and small and later in large
platters, smoking hot but cool on the mouth, they find
themselves laughing. Beers go down easily and with each course,
the woman calls out to them, "Still hungry?" Afraid to stop they
laugh and nod, the dishes magically appearing and going away.
As the meal winds down, the woman sits with them and eats a cup
of ice cream. Her brow is wet with sweat, and they laugh and
watch as the restaurant slowly empties. In time, the taxi driver
comes to the table, and the woman introduces him as her
youngest.
"Is everyone here yours?" Ray asks.
"Only the good ones," she says and kisses her son on the cheek.
The ride home is slow and calm, the shops all closed and dark.
It is late when they get to the hotel room and she turns and
goes into the bathroom when they are in the room. Sleepily, he
undresses and sits on the edge of the bed thinking about the
meal and the day. Images of the old woman, the children on the
beach, the dead man return to him.
When she returns, he is no longer tired, but just awake. "I'm
sorry," she says, falling onto the bed next to him. Her arm lays
open toward him, and he takes her hand. Her eyes, half open,
look at him, and he knows that she is thinking about sex,
recognizes the look from when they were first dating. For so
long, he has felt washed out and now being wanted fills him
again with something new. The sex is slow and steady and good
and he smells the sangria on her breath, low like dry dirt in a
sun shower.
Lying together, afterward, her eyes half closed now, Ray feels
full. His mind feels light and he knows it's the sunburn and
possibly dehydration but he lets the feeling linger and says,
"We should have another baby."
A long moment passes and Ray realizes that she does not flinch
at his asking. "You asleep?" he asks.
"No, I heard you," she says, turning her head toward him, her
hair falling across her face like a veil.
"Do you think about it?"
"When I was little, I had an aunt who came to live with us. Aunt
Honeywood," she says, and he feels his eyes close.
"Yes," he says, turning toward her, smelling her hair.
"She was pregnant. I didn't know it at the time. Pregnant and
alone, and it was awful, Ray. Her husband had left her and here
she was all alone and pregnant and stuck with us out on the farm
in the middle of nowhere and I swore that I'd never be her."
"You're not her. You have me."
"And I used to think that. Before. When June was with us." His
eyes open at the name. June. He hasn't thought of her as a
person in a long time. Just a thing that happened. "I used to
think that we were always going to be okay, and then I learned
that there is no always."
"I'm ready for us to have another baby, Jules."
"Why? Why do you want a baby, Ray?"
"What do you mean, why?"
"I mean why are you ready to do this again? Why now? How can you
even think of it?"
Ray rolls onto his back, and opens his eyes at the dark ceiling
above him. He feels the sound of the ocean more than hears it.
Feels his heart beat adjust to its rhythm, slows and relaxes. He
feels the relaxation of the loved and protected, and knows why
he wants children.
"I used to sit on my Dad's lap and watch the news with Walter
Cronkite."
"Mmm," Julia sounds.
"There were all of these images that I didn't understand. Deaths
and killing and shooting and still, sitting there, smelling my
Dad, feeling his whiskers on my neck, I thought that those
things couldn't touch me."
"But they can."
"But they touch everyone. That's no reason to stop going on.
We're not going on, anymore, you know. We're stuck."
"Can't go forward, can't go back."
"No, we can go forward. It's the only way we can go."
"We could go apart. Sideways,"
"I don't want that. I never have."
"I need to hear that. Sometimes you are so alone."
"Not really. I'm just not engaged. Like a motor with the clutch
in."
"And you think another baby will fix that?
"Yes, I do."
Time passes. Ray isn't sure how much. A few minutes? Half an
hour? A long time until he feels himself start to nod to sleep
and his body jerks like he is falling down stairs.
"Tell me a story, Ray. Tell me a story while I fall asleep. Tell
me a story like you'll tell our child."
Ray feels his chest swell with the words. "Once upon a time," he
starts. "Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who
lived with a man who lived inside his own head. `Why do you live
in your head,' the woman asked the man, but the man was so busy
thinking of what to say that he forgot to answer her." Ray feels
Julia move toward him, settling in. He feels her body relaxing.
"Eventually, she decided that he didn't want to talk to her
anymore and she went off by herself to have a baby. She thought
that the baby could talk to her, but the baby died, and when she
needed him most, the man spoke even less, because he was
thinking about what had happened and couldn't find the right
words to let her know that he was still in love with her, even
with everything that had happened."
Her breathing slows and Ray puts an arm around her. "So,
although the woman thought the man had withdrawn from her, had
gone even further away, he was really thinking about her all the
time. After a time, the man realized that in trying to get away
from the pain he felt, he had moved so far away from the only
thing that could cure the pain: his love for the woman."
He feels that she is asleep, but he goes on. "When they spoke,
they realized together that the only way away from the pain was
by being closer together, and so they decided to try again even
though they were both afraid. But now they were afraid together,
and it made all the difference."
Neal Gordon (gordon@ea.pvt.k12.pa.us)
---------------------------------------
Neal Gordon began studying writing at Iowa State University,
then transferred to the University of Iowa creative writing
program. Following completion of his degree, he left the Midwest
for the East Coast. He went to graduate school at Temple
University. His work has appeared in magazines, compilations and
online over the past decade.
Neal Gordon also wrote "When Something Goes" (v6n6) and "The
Worse Part" (v8n1) for InterText.
================================
The Metal Box by Tom Sheehan
================================
....................................................................
Family problems can be quite complex. But they can have
simple solutions.
....................................................................
It was so damned petty that not one person in the entire family
really knew how or where or when the rift began. It was there
just as suddenly as the January thaw, being felt, being known,
but still in all somewhat unbelievable. And every one of us, to
the last thinking one of us, looked to Grandfather John
Templemore to perform the cure, re-forge family ties, focus
attention to proper matters. Hadn't that man accomplished, so
many times, the near impossible? The wizened little man with the
piercing blue eyes that could accost you or lay balm on your
wounds. The white-bearded sage who reveled in poetry and masters
of the language. The articulate stone mason, his trowel now put
away, who knew Yeats better than the classicists. Saturday
evenings, on his wide porch fronting on the town, or deep in the
pocket of his kitchen, the fire at amble, he it was who took us
spellbound into the magic of joy, crowding us with the language.
At five foot seven he was a stick-out among the whole clan,
those grown among us all over six feet. "The vitamins did it,"
he swore time and time again. "The vitamins Grandma slipped into
your drinks, put in your cereal. Every swallow she was at you,
mark my words. Day in, day out, redemption was her law. Ireland
was to lay no claim of blight on her children. Its music
tolerated, its language invited to stay, but little of the foul
disease that ran itself to ground."
And here we were, despite the love and respect we bore for him,
his offspring of seven children and their twenty children,
pitched into separate camps. Wives refused to talk to other
wives; children, in folds of naive stubbornness, carried the
invisible emblems of parental separation; and nobody, any
longer, knew why.
The rift _was_, and it hurt. A touch of plague seemed to bear
it.
In a radial cluster of homes around Grandfather's house on the
hill looking down on the town, our homes looked spoked and
core-tied. No house of ours was more than a quarter mile from
the great gray house whose doors were never locked, where we
left for marriage or war three or four times over, or came home
to, where young Joey was nursed back to health after the Storm
in the Desert.
Except for Saturday evenings, that house near empty, we did not
visit, leaving him and Grandmother alone with a bit of silence,
the memories absorbing every bit of that silence. It was
Grandfather during the week who did the visiting, trudging his
way on good or bad days to this house or that house, trying to
keep knotted what he had tied during his eighty-seven years.
He'd come down off the hill as intent as a small breeze, letting
a color or an odor or a sound provide direction, as if ears or
eyes or nose set his visiting map in place rather than his
heart, rather than a schedule, rather than a logbook. "I saw
John Three throwing the ball at Kirch's mitt like some loosened
comet. I could hear it popping leather all the way from my
gate.... I saw Enda, her curls flying, running at the head of
the pack, a prime engine she was, full-out bore, the boys like
exhaust fumes trailing behind."
With the rift widening as insidiously as that which had shifted
Ireland's children about the world, his visits became more
frequent. House to house he went in calling, never mentioning a
cause, his intent open for inspection.
And it was that March, the air ripe with expectancy, a shell
ready to explode, that I first saw him carrying the metal box
under his arm. It was plain and small, bluish with some legend
faded to smithereens, and mysterious. Never had he cluttered
himself except with a book or two, spines up under an armpit,
titles caught in darkness, us left wondering what he was
reading. Never would he carry about other such cargo. Now with
spring here, John Three's fastball and curve finding pace with
each other and getting ready for a new season, Enda and
Fitz-grace flying as twins on the high school cinders, pilot
Paul home for a month after seeing hell on his daily horizon
indicator, Grandfather John Templemore came among us with the
metal box under one arm.
Every step he took away from the house on the hill, the box was
under his arm. Every time he was visible to any one of us, the
metal box, still bluish and faded at legend, was under an arm.
It could have been sewn in place. Grandmother could have tucked
it there as easily as basting a hem. Grafted to his body it
could have been.
And the other change came too. Before any of the grandchildren
could get to his house on Saturday evenings, before they could
climb the hill for Yeats or Sean O'Faolain or Padraic O'Conaire,
for that hard round mouth of his to soften on certain consonants
the way music comes from nothing it seems, he was out of the
house and down the hill.
Saturdays, for the want of a word, became _different_. No longer
did the cluster squeeze in on him, no longer did Innisfree drift
with resonance from the deep heart's core, or The Devil and
O'Flaherty draw breath all the way down into a lung's expanse.
Into the separate camps he moved in random schedule, slower in
step, the box a new weight. Once inside, once settled on a new
dais, he'd recite, read, play the mimic again, but it was not
the same. From his delivery something had been taken, from the
magic an edge of voice removed. And the metal box was an alien
prospect, though not one soul asked him about it. John
Templemore was not asked such questions.
But we began to talk about it, that faded blue, totally curious
metal box -- casually at first, as an aside, almost under our
breath, and then at length as a solid curiosity. The box assumed
the proportions of an unwanted visitor only grudgingly accepted
into our company. It became, momentarily, and then completely,
topic and essay. Near-mute wives began to nod at those they had
recently ignored, began to find themselves coasting or sliding
into a banter and a head-to-head chat over short fences, over
bush and rail, at corners. The box's contents became uppermost
in all of this; not why it was, but what it was, a fleeting
whispery thing of relevance we could tie no strings to.
The grandchildren, and friends and companions of course, more
visibly deprived of the tones, inflections and the rolling Rs of
Saturday evenings' magic, were quicker to react. Out of their
encampments they came unflagged and open, honest in each and
every assessment, citing first their uniform loss, and then
their guesses. They offered the idea of a last will and
testament to put us all in proper place; Grandfather's own one
and only poem that had taken a whole lifetime to compose; the
lot of money he had saved over the years or the winnings of the
Irish Sweepstakes no one had ever learned of; a map of the gold
mine he had found as a boy near Keene, New Hampshire while on a
fishing trip along the river that passed through Gilsum.
There was such a myriad concoction of ideas and values that
whole generations had brought to deposit. It was carnival and
delicatessen, circus and smorgasbord.
And, as suddenly as the proper burst of another spring day, the
rift was gone. Melted. Disappeared. Over and out and gone. We
did not believe it had ever been. And we did not speak of it,
rather enjoying with a savage appetite a long-lost favor given
back so abruptly. We enjoyed each other again. We waited for
Grandfather to sit on his porch on Saturday evening, waiting for
us, waiting to toss that magic blanket over the most receptive
audience of all.
It did not happen. Grandfather John Templemore died walking down
the hill on a Saturday morning in April. Young Joey saw him from
the road.
The magic was gone, and all knew it. At his graveside we stood
hushed, expectant, knowing better. Something beautiful had been
taken away. Yet something beautiful had been given back to us.
That night Joey opened the box. It appeared empty, but we all
knew what had been in it. How it had manifested itself. Now we
think we are back to where we used to be, where we were meant to
be.
But Saturday, as far as everybody knows, is gone forever.
Tom Sheehan (tomsheehan@mediaone.net)
---------------------------------------
Tom Sheehan has published stories in numerous publications,
three books of poetry, and is co-editor of A Gathering of
Memories, Saugus 1900-2000, a nostalgic 482-page look at his
home town of Saugus, MA.
=====================================================
Fourteen Ways of Seeing Dad by Jonathan Alexander
=====================================================
....................................................................
Here's a collection of snapshots of life: some of them real,
some imagined.
....................................................................
These are the things I know about my dad.
i.
Coming home from the army, honorably discharged from his forced
service during the Korean War, he's hitchhiking home on a dusty
road in Georgia. A convertible pulls up, top down, and a
youngish guy tells him to get in. He can take my dad as far as
Birmingham, possibly further. My dad gets in, and they drive for
hours and hours.
Eventually, they stop at a motel to spend the night before
venturing further in the morning. The driver takes the bed, and
my dad spreads out on the floor. The lights are turned off, and,
after a moment, the driver tells my dad that he would probably
be more comfortable in the bed. My dad agrees and climbs in
beside the driver.
I don't know why, but I imagine my dad doing this very
carefully -- not in a fearful sort of way, but in a methodical,
almost gingerly manner. Quietly. A few minutes pass and then
the driver puts his hand on dad's thigh. Immediately, my dad
gets out of bed, pulls on his clothing, and leaves the hotel.
I imagine him walking all night. Somehow, he eventually arrives
home in Mississippi. Picayune.
I do not know what he told the driver, or even what they must
have talked about for the hours and hours they were together,
crossing Georgia and into Alabama. They may not have said much
at all. My father never spoke much. But he told us this story
one night, shortly after mother had cleared the plates from the
table.
My sisters and I remained quiet and still while mother began
washing the dinner. No one knew what to say, but I, at fifteen,
knew the story had been for my benefit, a cautionary tale. I got
up and walked quietly away from the table.
ii.
At times, my mother met with other women to arrange schedules
for after-school care for their children or to borrow various
cooking items or ingredients, and the gathered women would talk
and talk -- sharing much more than just Tupperware tips. But I
never once saw my father talk to another man except in the most
businesslike way possible. I don't think he had any friends. He
even once said, over dinner, that friendships between a man and
a woman were far more stable than those between people of the
same sex.
At the time, as he was passing the butter, I didn't buy it --
and I still don't. I knew that statements such as these had
histories, whole genealogies of people trying to love one
another. But I was not privy to this ancestry. I could not count
the rings on this particular family tree. And what little I knew
seemed hardly enough to prepare me for my own life, especially
when I wanted to know how my father and mother had struggled,
how they had survived.
I know that my dad worked for the electric company for most of
his adult life, but I know that he got more of a charge out of
retiring early than he ever did hauling meters from house to
house. He hated his job -- for the thirty years he had it, and
for the twenty years he survived it. He will take much of his
story to the grave.
My mom, made of sturdy stuff, didn't want to be a blue-collar
wife, so she tried a business, and in its way, it succeeded; it
proved that women who have married up into the blue-collar world
can pretty much have their way with their men, twisting their
arms into the most pathetic ventures imaginable.
I pitied them. I always thought they should divorce. I always
thought that both of them would be happier pursuing other lives,
other loves. Any other life, any other love. But that's not the
way it was done. You moved up into the world through marriage.
As my mother once put it, why cut your resources in half?
Over time, my mother slowly explained all of this to me. She was
a tomboy and came from a very large family in which an alcoholic
father, coming home smelling of jeans, dirt, and sweat, would
sling his wife's laboriously prepared meal all around the
kitchen. He would not remember doing this later. But my mother
remembered going without supper because you couldn't eat off of
the floor, no matter how hungry you were. Shortly after she
turned eighteen, she and her gay brother moved away to New
Orleans, where they figured they could start over, the butch
little girl and the fag making a home for themselves at last.
They knew there were other places.
My mother said that she married my father because he understood.
I had trouble with this because I knew so little about my dad's
life before he got married and I was born. Mom would tell
stories -- granted, always with a moral -- but at least she
talked, and my sisters and I slowly developed a sense of who she
was as a person and not just as a mother.
My father, though, was a different story, with a seemingly
simpler plot, almost two-dimensional. In short, a man -- not
much to know except for the given. What I _did_ know was that my
dad had grown up in southern Mississippi, and I think that part
of him never forgave himself for that. I don't think he'd quite
put it that way, but he wore sadness like a pair of
sweat-stained overalls. Throughout his entire life, he worked in
someone else's uniform, inherited from having grown up poor in a
small southern town.
On one thing, my parents were clearly united: they both insisted
that we never know their lives as it played itself out on their
flesh and in their memories, so they shielded us with everything
their money could buy. But even as a child, I could tell which
histories were authentic, and which store-bought.
And as I began separating out the course of my desires from
theirs, I began to resent them. Compared to the embarrassment of
riches I imagined for myself, their lives seemed weak and
pathetic. I enjoyed culture and the arts, read voraciously,
imagined myself into a future resplendent with the height of
aesthetic appeal. I would become a writer while they were just
hicks. I would know the depths of the soul while they bargained
at Kmart. I knew I was different, and knowing them (in pity)
would tell me exactly how -- and for what purpose.
I thought I could tell which futures were authentic, and I would
be the arbiter of my own destiny. But the only thing I really
knew is that there were -- there _had_ to be -- other places.
iii.
I once saw a photo of my dad in his army uniform, posing for a
picture he'd sent home to his mom and dad. I couldn't believe
how old the picture was. It seemed to me that I shouldn't be
holding something so old and worn, and I thought this stiff
little photograph should be behind glass in a museum, awaiting
the inspection of others and their learned comments about
history and politics. "Note the insignia and the uniform:
clearly the Korean conflict. I wonder what year this is?" "Well,
if you examine the globe in the background, you can see the
borders of..." "Oh, yes, I see... that would mean..."
"Exactly..."
I carefully put the photo back in the cardboard box from which
I'd taken it, and then I put the box back in the bottom drawer
of the built-in chest. I had been home alone, finding a history,
while my parents went to visit my grandmother's gravesite.
At times, I'd go with them to Picayune, where we'd spend the
entire day transported to a different decade, a stilled eddy in
time. I never much liked these visits, and as soon as I could I
convinced my parents that I was old enough to stay home by
myself, where I'd spend the day either masturbating or rooting
through my dad's things, careful to place everything back
exactly as I'd found it.
But sometimes, they'd pressure me with family responsibility.
You ain't seen Aint Jo in months. She don't even know what you
look like no more. And at times, it was easier to submit myself
to inspection than assert my precarious adulthood. So I'd go
with them to visit my dad's older sisters, little knowing at the
time that these trips offered me a silent insight into the world
still playing in my father's imagination.
For instance, there was Aint Jo, who gummed her words and lived
her days in cotton floral onesies. I never knew if she worked or
not, and I wasn't certain that she knew how to clean house
beyond stacking dishes on every raised surface so you wouldn't
have to step around them as they cluttered the floor. But mostly
I couldn't take my eyes off her mouth, which worked nonstop from
the moment we arrived to the time we departed, when my mother
would attempt graciously to decline supper served in unwashed
pots and pans. We spent the most time at her house.
Then there was Aint Ru, who could've been a carbon copy of Jo.
Ru lived in a trailer, a dirty silver tube that might have once
orbited the earth but for the lethargy of southern heat. Her
many children had steadily built their white wooden homes around
their mother's plot of dirt, creating a world that seemed a
separate state of their union. They knew each other, obviating
the need to know anyone else.
When we'd visit, I'd usually hang back, aloof. Their children,
even those my age, played games whose rules I would never
comprehend. I'd catch a glimpse every now and then of their
exchanges of power and dominance, of how they'd transform a bat
and ball into the battlements of an ongoing war of the sexes,
but I'd usually watch from the sidelines, prematurely scornful
of their simple ways.
My mother would encourage me to join in, but my dad himself
remained mute, choosing to remain aloof. He seldom spoke at
these gatherings, and my mom had to carry most of the
conversation, about which she'd bitch all the way back to New
Orleans.
I don't think my dad's sisters approved of my mother. She'd
taken their boy, their plaything. I'd seen the one picture,
buried in my dad's memory box, of him outfitted in a frilly
dress and bonnet. He couldn't have been more than five, and I
wondered how many such pictures from all over the world must
exist of little boys dressed up as little girls, the living
playthings of sisters and mothers. The camera would just _have_
to come out and record the comic atrocity, to be kept secret the
rest of the little boy's days, hidden in a box at the bottom of
a chest of built-in drawers.
I wondered why no such picture had been taken of me.
iv.
One time, I woke up clutching my chest, pain choking my call for
help. My parents found me and rushed me to the hospital, where I
was released the next day, no explanation. My mother stayed with
me overnight, sleeping upright in a chair by the mechanical
bed, and before my father left to take my sisters home, my
mother told him to kiss me. I remember the grazing of his
stubble on my twenty-year old cheek. I remember shuddering, just
a little, but I cannot recall if it was him or me.
v.
My parents never hit us. They had themselves been raised with
firm hands, perhaps too firm, and I think that kept them from
striking us, even when we probably deserved it. My friends'
parents thought us odd in that we were never spanked; nobody
could be _that_ good.
At times, friends would describe the intimacy of punishment, of
taking their licks like a "man." Sons in particular seemed to
get it from their dads with clockwork regularity. Part of me, I
know, was a bit jealous when hearing these stories. I knew my
friends would've thought me crazy, but I wondered what it
would've been like to have dad pull down my pants or swat my
butt, his emotion for me unrestrained and directed at last. But
I never saw him once raise a hand to me. It was so much easier
to simply ignore.
vi.
When I was in the ninth grade, we were taught some basics of
family genealogy, and the inevitable assignment finally arrived:
construct a family tree and history scrapbook, dating as far
back as you can. Discover your roots. Discover who you really
are.
I could fill out mom's portion of the tree fairly well; with
age, she increasingly enjoyed remembering her childhood,
probably because it was increasingly distant from her. My dad,
however, wouldn't be pinned down: "The past is done with. Only
the future counts." I knew I couldn't write that down and turn
it in, as true as it might be for my dad. So, reluctantly, he
said he'd give me the necessary names.
I awoke one morning to find a list of relatives on a scrap of
paper held to the refrigerator with a banana magnet. Dad had
already gone to work, and he'd probably written the names down
while he had his morning coffee. This didn't surprise me. But I
was old enough to be intrigued by the reticence. It was at about
this same time that I started to want to stay home on Sundays,
when the rest of the family went to grandma's gravesite. And
slowly I began to piece things together.
vii.
When my dad was 19, freshly returned from the army, he threw
what little he had away, put the rest in a duffel bag and took
the bus to New Orleans. A friend had phoned and said that his
boss was hiring people to work in a recently built jelly
factory. The pay wasn't hot, but the boarding house around the
corner didn't cost much anyway, and besides, he'd be living in
New Orleans. A bar on every street corner. A brothel in the back
of the bar on every street corner.
There were really no other options. Picayune wasn't a
particularly gripping place if you were young, even for the most
avid fans of local high school football. And the army had shaken
him: he knew there were other places. His sisters, though, were
content, and neither of them would see him off at the bus
station. His mother didn't speak to him for a year afterward,
and his dad had hardly ever spoken to him at all.
So, stowing his life above his seat, he rode the bus to the
jelly factory and the boarding house. It wasn't long, though,
before the sweetness of the factory became cloying, and the
roaches in the boarding house competed for bed space, so dad
took another job. Ten years later he met my mother, and together
they drove themselves into a family, a house, and as much
respectability as they could.
viii.
My father didn't marry until he was thirty-two. That's a lot of
time between getting out of the army at nineteen and finally
"settling down," as my mother constantly advises me to do.
Sometimes, I think that I'm following in my father's footsteps,
but I have no idea where he might have placed his own feet for
that mysterious stretch of time before his marriage.
I have imagined many possibilities for him.
ix.
Once, after my dad had just turned twenty-two, he and a group of
guys from work go out for a drink, perhaps visiting one of those
neighborhood bars on a street corner. This one just so happens
to have a brothel in back. First, though, they have a beer and
peel peanuts, dropping the shells on the floor, ignoring the
small red and white striped containers the peanuts are served
in. The news plays loudly on the television because no one is
really supposed to talk after all, this being largely a stag bar
with a brothel in back.
Eventually, one of the guys gets up, winks, and says he'll be
right back. And then they are all, one at a time, getting up to
relieve themselves. And then it's dad's turn, and he goes
because he knows it's what he's supposed to do, like dropping
the peanut shells on the floor.
It's over quickly and he doesn't even get a good look at her
face, but when they are done, he rests his hands for a moment on
her thigh. She hasn't shaved on a while, he thinks, and for a
moment he's hitchhiking again through Georgia. He gets up
quickly and leaves, the guys clapping him on the back as they
all leave the bar.
x.
Another time, my dad plans his escape. He's twenty-five, maybe
twenty-six, and he senses that time is running out. He would
like to travel West, destination unsure, but he knows that there
is something in the world he can do, something he can put his
hands to besides the jars of jelly he helps to fill, or the
meters he detaches from houses that refuse to pay their bill.
He won't go alone, though. He can't. But Beau, his best friend,
this funny, funny coon-ass from Lafayette, just won't go with
him. He has friends here. More importantly, he has family here,
and they would never forgive him leaving the state. They barely
forgive him moving to New Orleans, but in the course of a life
some things must be done.
So my dad and Beau argue about it one summer night. Beau offers
him the necessary cash, a friendly consolation prize, but my dad
is not appeased. There are some minor accusations, nothing
really serious, but they don't speak again like they used to.
Beau finds other friends. My dad works at his job.
Then he gets married.
xi.
At times, I know I must have imagined him gay -- a cute, if
skinny country boy in the Big Easy. A little naive, but all the
more attractive because of it. I admit I liked my dad, grinning
just a bit in his khaki army uniform, bending slightly over to
rest his elbow on his knee. He seemed so pleasantly surprised to
know the world bigger than Picayune, even if he was only
stationed in some out-of-the-way fort, never making it to Korea
because the war ended. Still, the look on his face said it was
enough.
I often wish I'd stolen the picture and hidden it in a book. I
could see my dad, off from work, wearing those tight-fitting
uniform pants, perhaps seeing the driver from Georgia in a
crowded bar. He shyly looks away, but he knows he's been
spotted, and he gives in to the inevitable. They complete their
unfinished business, and another history blossoms into the
future.
But I know this is wrong. I know these thoughts belong to
someone else, not him.
xii.
I am convinced that my father is the first to know I'm gay, even
before my mother, even before me.
Not because I rejected the sports equipment they bought me when
I was young, hoping I'd outgrow my glasses and oversized head.
And not because I preferred to read and play school with the
neighborhood kids, whose parents steadily refused invitations to
come over. And not because of my flamboyance or daydreaming,
which other boys forsook for the more ritualistic pleasures of
knowing each other's bodies.
Actually, if I'm pushed to say how I know he knew, I don't think
I could come up with a satisfactory answer. But I know that men
usually know, or they are at least quick to suspect -- often
correctly.
But I'm not being completely honest. He knew when the picture of
him in the little girl's dress was suddenly missing. No
announcement of lost goods was ever made, but he came down to
dinner one evening, quietly took his place, listened while my
mother said the prayer before meals, and, just before the prayer
was over, stole a glance at me, his head still slightly bowed.
He knew I had taken the picture. If I'd have swiped the one of
him in his army uniform, he might have almost been proud. As it
is, though, a whole other story opened up before us.
We ate most of the meal, as usual, in silence. And that was that.
xiii.
When I finally brought my first lover home, I didn't tell my
parents what Mike was to me or what the rings on our pinkie
fingers meant, exchanged in a drunken ceremony in a crowded bar.
I couldn't have been more than nineteen at the time, and, having
grown up in the Deep South, I could barely put into words what
the love of two boys might mean to others -- except that this is
not something you talk about or even admit to. Even in New
Orleans, sex of any stripe existed between Bourbon Street and
the Riverfront.
I knew, though, that I was doing something illicit, even
damnable -- and hot as hell. I kept hoping mom or dad would
catch me trying to pull Mike's leg hairs as we sat around the
dinner table. Every now and then, Mike's eyes would bulge and
I'd grin through the mashed potatoes in my mouth.
My dad never raised his eyes from his plate. Nothing, perhaps,
unusual in that, but I noticed it for the first time. I'd known
before that my dad didn't say much during meals, and that the
rest of us should be quiet. But tonight, chewing my food as
quietly as possible, I saw my dad, in his electric company
uniform, his weather-beaten face, his blotchy and straining
hands, and I thought to myself, never, no. Not for me.
xiv.
I moved out of my parents' home when I was seventeen. I went to
college, paid for my own education, and kept my life a secret
from those who had given it to me. Mostly, they kept their eyes
on their own plates. Sometimes I'd visit, and they would bring
me back to school, stopping to eat at the Piccadilly Cafeteria
outside Baton Rouge. Each time, we'd order the same thing, my
parents sharing a plate of food between them. By this time, they
could afford more, but why cut your resources in half?
My mother and I talked, sort of, and my dad focused on his
plate. No one asked about Mike, or why he had moved out of our
shared dorm room. Most of the time, the clacking of metal on
plates from the surrounding diners overwhelmed our need to talk,
and we sat silently, stiffly.
After the last of the dessert had been eaten and my mother had
had her post-meal cigarette, she began to pick up her things.
They wanted to drive me into town before heading back home, but
I refused. I could easily take the bus.
For just a moment before leaving, though, I looked at my dad
full in the face. And he looked at me, first out of the corner
of his eyes, his head still slightly bowed, and then with his
head lifted and his eyes steady. I nodded once and said "Dad."
Then I got up from the table and walked quietly away.
Jonathan Alexander (jamma@fuse.net)
-------------------------------------
Jonathan Alexander teaches English at the University of
Cincinnati. His most recent writing appears in Valparaiso Poetry
Review, Chiron Review, Salt River Review, SugarMule, Radical
Teacher, The International Journal of Sexuality and Gender
Studies, and Blithe House Quarterly.
==============================================
The Gilding of Norm Lilly by T.G. Browning
==============================================
....................................................................
Some people wear their unpopularity like a badge.
When you've got it, baby, flaunt it!
....................................................................
1.
----
There are three common reactions to an incoming phone call at
2:47 in the morning, if you're Doris Preston, Chief of Police of
the City of Toledo, Oregon. The first is to grab the phone
immediately, then snarl "What the hell do you want?" The second
is to rip the phone out of the wall, turn over, and go back to
sleep. The third is to elbow Milt in the ribs and mutter words
to the effect that he should answer it, you're in conference.
All three methods felt too exhausting this particular morning,
so Doris invented a fourth way. She answered it, and in a mild
voice said: "Can't it wait till morning?"
This threw the person on the other end of the line, Jimmy
Hartman, Doris's second in command, into confusion since he'd
expected the three usual options and had an answer prepared for
the first one, with contingency plans for two and three. The
phone company got an easy 10 seconds of work transmitting
nothing but phone hiss.
Finally, Doris sighed and sat up. "Okay, Jimmy, I'm awake. Not
necessarily aware, but I am awake. What?"
"You'd better get dressed and meet me at 1131 Spruce Loop Road."
He paused, licked his lips and started to continue, only to get
cut off.
"Why on earth would I go to 113-something Spruce at -- " Doris
squinted at the alarm clock on the headboard behind her, " --
2:48 a.m., Pacific Whatever Time?"
That Jimmy could answer, so he did. "To look at Norm Lilly's
body before it gets hauled to the morgue."
Phone hiss. Gears slowly turning. And then, "Judas Priest. And
you're not going to tell me he had a heart attack, are you?"
It was a rhetorical question but by this time, Jimmy didn't let
that stop him. "No, he didn't. At least I don't think so. I
think the three bullets in his chest killed him."
"Okay, Jimmy. I'm on my way. Start the ball rolling."
"Right, Doris."
Amazingly, Milt managed to sleep through it all. A fact that
Doris planned to remember and comment on later.
The Oregon coast town of toledo is a small town set in a valley
six miles from the ocean and the much bigger town of Newport. It
was built on hills. Really ugly, nasty, smell-the-burnt-clutch
hills that gave the town a freakish, poverty-stricken, San
Francisco-ish, where-have-all-the-people-gone look. This made
passers through pass right on through, at speed.
It had actually been a blessing when the Oregon State Highway
Department had bypassed Toledo entirely, even though it put a
number of locals out of business. For one thing, Main Street
probably wouldn't have to be resurfaced for another thirty
years. For a second, buildings on Main Street were freed up by
an extended round of bankruptcies, which in turn lowered the
asking rent, which in turn allowed a number of start-up
businesses to be born. There were now more merchants on Main
Street than at any time in the last 70 years -- though they all
made considerably less than the ones that they replaced.
Doris lived up the hill from Main Street and after turning left
on it, headed for Butler Bridge. It crossed a slough of the
Yaquina River and provided the only access to a peninsula where
Spruce Loop Road happened to be. She glanced once at each of the
three buildings Norm Lilly owned on the main drag and sourly
shook her head.
If anybody was going to get murdered in Toledo, it would have
been Lilly. The man had been cordially loathed and
not-so-cordially threatened for the last twenty years,
particularly so since the discovery that he had owned 80 percent
of the land condemned by the state to build the bypass. It also
turned out that he'd owned the only qualifying gravel pit within
thirty miles, which provided the aggregate for the bypass and
was the not-quite-silent partner of the contractor who got the
bid. Throw in the fact that he'd slipped a ringer in as pitcher
for the Little League team he sponsored -- a midget with a
wicked fastball -- and you had a man destined to die by violence
or venom. If Doris had only motive to go on, she'd be pushing
retirement before she'd gotten through investigating the
first-round draft picks.
Doris crossed the bridge named after Horace Butler, the first
person to plunge to his death by falling off the railing while
drunk, made a right just past the looming Georgia-Pacific
semi-solid landfill, and three minutes later she was at the
Lilly residence.
Jimmy had taken at least 20 more pictures than were needed or
tasteful, and stood leaning against the upright piano in the
front room. He'd managed to sweet-talk Tim Thompson to come out
rather than the county coroner, a move which would win him
brownie points with Doris. (Doris had sworn that the next time
she looked at Dr. O'Hara, it would be over the barrel of an
illegal automatic weapon.) Further, since Dr. Thompson was
competent, while O'Hara added new, majestic meaning to the word
incompetent, it meant saving at least four days of confused
exchanges between the county coroner and the Toledo P.D. Jimmy
might have been young, but he wasn't stupid.
Thompson was a tall man with a serious face and a permanent tan
acquired by some mysterious process no one would guess about. He
generally looked distinguished and thoughtful. At that moment,
however, he looked more puzzled than anything else, and Jimmy
found himself gnawing a knuckle wondering what the problem could
be. He was about ready to find out when Doris opened the front
door and marched in. Her dark brown hair looked to have had a
passing argument with a brush sometime in the past hour or so
and she had gone so far as to don her uniform, minus the hat. At
5'4" and 115 pounds, she might not have looked ominous, but that
was only the impression that only the chronically stupid would
keep for any length of time.
She looked over the scene and Jimmy was gratified to see her
glance once at Thompson and then nod in his direction. She
didn't say anything but approached the body from the right side
and then leaned over to get a better look.
Oh, thank God, she thought. No shots to the head. I just hate
looking at that. Her eyes traveled down the body to the chest
where two gunshot wounds were evident -- neither one looked to
have hit the heart. A little further down was the third wound
Jimmy had alluded to -- about belly-button level -- and Doris
suddenly a bad feeling begin a free ascent up her spine. She
straightened up as Dr. Thompson also stood up and looked down at
her, his eyes questioning.
"Oh, jeez." Doris muttered, looking around the body. "He wasn't
moved, was he?"
Thompson shrugged. "I don't know at this point. But even if he
was, you see the problem."
"Damn. Damn, damn, damn. I just hate it when things like this
happen."
Jimmy straightened up and cocked his head, catching her
attention. "What, Doris? What's going on?"
Thompson looked back to Doris, unwilling to intervene. "Coward."
Doris muttered at him. "Leave me the dirty work."
"What dirty work? Doris..." Jimmy didn't like the way the
conversation was going.
"Jimmy. Look at the body."
"I have, so?"
"Look around the body."
"I _have_ Doris. What's your point?"
"Three wounds. None instantly fatal." She looked at him for a
moment and then sighed. "So where's the blood? There ought to be
blood all over the place."
Jimmy looked at the corpse and then back at Doris. "But there
isn't any."
"Right."
"So?"
"So, either there's a vampire living under the carpet, or he was
dead when he was shot."
Jimmy looked to Thompson, who nodded.
Absently, Doris asked, "Who called this in?"
"Anon -- "
" -- ymous, right. Did you check the caller I.D. log?"
"Pay -- "
" -- phone. Right." Doris straightened up and looked at him. "At
least there are some things in life you can count on besides
taxes." She turned to Thompson. "We're going to need time of
death."
Thompson nodded. "I'll know after the autopsy."
Doris glanced over at Jimmy, and then at the former Mr. Lilly.
Out of nowhere she said, "Look at his face. See anything odd?"
Jimmy bent over, emulating Doris's earlier stance. He didn't
even twitch for almost a minute and finally sighed and
straightened up. "No, I don't. What am I missing?"
Doris shrugged. "It's probably nothing but my imagination. I
haven't run into Lilly more than a couple of times in the last
six months. His face looks thinner."
Jimmy nodded. "I'll grant you that, but so what?"
"He looks terrible, Jimmy."
"He's dead, Doris. That happens a lot when people die."
She shook her head impatiently. "He looks like somebody who's
been in considerable pain for quite some time."
Jimmy absently nodded and looked back at the corpse. He thought
back to his uncle who'd died of bone cancer when he was a
teenager. Damn, she was right.
Thompson spoke up. "Who was his doctor? That'd speed things
along if we could talk to him."
Doris frowned and shook her head. "I know he wasn't McCallum's
-- but it could have been anybody from Newport. Jimmy, check the
bathroom and bedroom for prescription bottles. Start calling
around as soon as it's a decent time." Doris looked at her watch
and groaned. "Damn, it's already four. Almost no point in going
back to bed."
But she did.
The tail end of that crisp April morning greeted Doris when she
took up the Lilly case again, heading to see the late Lilly's
sister at the Lincoln County courthouse. She hoped to discover
who his doctor had been, but with the great love often found
between siblings, Doris figured she'd be lucky if Alice could
recall his phone number. Calling the extended Lilly family close
was accurate only if living on the same tectonic plate counted.
At least they were making progress. Jimmy had turned up a
prescription for morphine tablets and was waiting for a call
back from the Portland pharmacy where it'd come from. Too bad
the prescribing doctor, a Dr. Raemi in Portland, had left on
vacation and wasn't likely to return for two weeks.
Dr. Thompson had made it a point to retrieve the bullets first
thing. After Jimmy had struck out calling doctors, he'd headed
to Corvallis and the State Police Lab with all three -- a 9mm, a
.38, and a .22. Doris had only shook her head when she'd learned
that bit of news. Three different guns argued for three
different shooters and Doris had a bent mental image of people
lined up to pay a buck to take a shot at Norm Lilly. Hell, with
Lilly's popularity, such an offering could have put even the
Lincoln County Fair in the black.
Alice had her back to Doris, but somehow sensed her approach.
Before Doris could get a word out, the county clerk said, "I'm
busy and you're out of your jurisdiction."
Doris expected no less. The two of them didn't have what one
would call a cordial relationship.
"Glad to see you too, Alice. Got a few moments?"
"No. Not that it matters to you, I suppose."
"Too true." Doris rounded Alice's desk and parked herself in a
chair from the next desk beyond.
Alice didn't look up. She was peering at a registered letter,
reading with an intensity that would have done credit to a
mercury vapor lamp.
"Look, Alice, I'll make this as painless on the two of us as I
can. Okay?"
Alice shook her head, held up a well-manicured nail, finished
what she was reading, and then put it down slowly. Softly she
said, her face chiseled in smooth, unyielding stone, "That son
of a bitch." Her voice sounded almost awed.
"Who?"
Cold gray eyes bored into a set of equally cold gray eyes. "My
brother, Norman."
"Which is why I'm here. Norm's..."
"Dead. I know." She paused and took a deep breath. "I got a call
from the hospital."
"I won't say I'm sorry. You don't like hypocrites any better
than I do. Your brother was a jerk."
"No argument. On that, you, me, Mother, and all three of Norm's
ex-wives can stand shoulder to shoulder. Probably a whole hell
of a lot of others too numerous to name."
"Was he sick?"
Alice regarded Doris for a moment and then flicked her eyes
around the room. Abruptly she got up. "You want answers, I want
a smoke." She didn't wait to see if Doris followed; she headed
for the back of the office and the worker bee elevator. Doris
just managed to get a hand interposed between the doors as they
closed, waited for the doors to sullenly jerk back open again
and then joined her. Alice ignored Doris and fumbled in her
purse, finally extracting a pack of Lucky Strikes and a lighter.
About that time, they hit the top of the building and exited to
the county prisoners' exercise yard, forty square yards of
asphalt, chain link fence, and razor wire. It doubled as the
smoking ghetto, which might explain why a lot of the smokers had
started to act a lot like lifers on Devil's Island.
"So you want to know about Norm's health," Alice said, after
lighting up. "Why is that?"
"I don't know if you've been told, but Norm had three bullets in
him when he was found."
Alice cocked her head and blew a smoke ring. A faint, wan smile
lurked behind the smoke. "Really? Self-inflicted?"
"I doubt it."
"So somebody killed him and you're asking how his health was."
Alice looked off to the west, where she could see two tiny black
figures grimly trying to surf in water within spitting distance
of freezing. "I can't for the life of me see how it makes any
difference."
Doris didn't answer immediately but followed the other woman's
gaze for a moment and then looked back at her. Why _did_ she
want to know? She couldn't think of a good reason.
"Just trying to pin everything down. Probably doesn't relate in
any way..."
"But you're so thorough you make me queasy."
"Thanks. Glad to help out."
"It happens that you're right. Norman was sick. Terminal, as a
matter of fact. From what I was told -- "
"By?"
"Norman, who else? And no, he wasn't trying to mend fences
before he croaked. Far from it. He wanted to make damned sure my
daughter paid off her loan to him before he went to that great
boiler room in the sky. Or ground, more likely, the bastard."
"How long did he have?"
"Between three and five months. Assuming, of course, that he
couldn't get a liver transplant."
"His liver was...?"
"Inflamed, enlarged, and cirrhotic, was what I was told. It
sounded like it wanted more Lebensraum to me."
"Loaner livers are hard to get, I take."
Alice nodded, still looking thoughtful. "Scarce as hen's teeth
from what I hear. I tell you, I nearly died laughing when he
told me."
Doris cocked an eyebrow; she realized that someone wanting to
see Norm die slowly and horribly probably wouldn't shoot him.
Much too quick an end. A really nasty poison would beat a gun
hands down, with an attitude like that.
"When did you last see Norm?"
"Hell, I don't remember, Doris. Sometime last week. Wednesday, I
think. Here at the courthouse when he was filing some papers....
He was shot three times?"
"That's the way it looked."
"But you think he was already dead when he was shot, right?"
Alice's expression was so neutral it couldn't properly be called
an expression.
"Where did you hear that?"
"O'Hara been talking about it. It's all over the building."
Doris sighed. "Swell. Why couldn't he wait a day or two for
revealing that?"
Alice nodded -- she didn't think that much of O'Hara either.
"I guess that answers what questions I had. If you can come up
with anything that relates to the investigation, give me a call.
I can't imagine what it might be, but keep it in mind." Alice shrugged and watched as Doris headed around the elevator
to the stairs. There was something implacable about Doris that
made her nervous.
Doris decided to take a chance that Tim Thompson was in and
O'Hara wasn't, so she dropped by the county coroner's office on
her way out. Natalie Cloughlin perched on a stool, idly browsing
the Web for lack of any real office duties. Natalie was a snoop,
a ghoul, and a gossip... which explained why Doris thought she
was a scream 90 percent of the time.
"Hey, Doris. Looking for Tim or Dale?"
Doris regarded her for a moment before she replied. "Take a wild
guess, Natalie."
The other woman chuckled evilly. "Tim stepped out about five
minutes ago but should be back any minute. Dale is flapping his
gums to one of the commissioners, two doors down."
Doris sighed. Cooling her heels never appealed to her, even if
it was part of the job. She grabbed a note pad and a pen and
started to write a note to Thompson. She had gotten six words
into it before the door opened behind her and she heard a
soprano voice.
"Is Chief Preston -- oh. There you are."
Doris looked over her shoulder and saw a woman she knew vaguely:
Christine Langerhaus. She worked for Georgia-Pacific, bossing
shipping, scheduling trains bringing in materials and taking
paper products out. Doris had spoken to her on a number of
occasions by phone -- generally when some Toledoite had been
trapped by a train undergoing extended mating rites.
"Here, Christine. What do you need?" Doris turned back to her
note with the intention of finishing it, but found her hand
frozen in mid-scrawl when Ms. Langerhaus said, distinctly:
"I killed Norm Lilly last night. I thought you might want to
talk to me."
Doris found her whole body slowly and very carefully turning to
the left, as she wondered if Christine had brought the gun along
to show Doris just _how_ she'd shot Lilly. She rather hoped she
hadn't. Natalie's bemused expression crossed her field of view,
and Doris felt minutely relieved that Natalie didn't look like
somebody who expected her counter to require the massive
cleaning of bloodstains in the next thirty seconds.
Just as distinctly as Christine had spoken, Doris replied, "Oh.
Really?" Her voice sounded so calm that she wondered if someone
else might have replied for her.
"Here's the gun."
Doris's larynx, warmed up and working on its own without
cerebral support, said, mildly, "That's very thoughtful of
you..." and her left hand, following the lead provided by the
voice box, reached out slowly. It's amazing how many body parts
figure they can really shine if they're only given half a
chance. Before Doris had even managed to look at the woman, her
hand closed around the grip of a gun.
Doris hefted the gun curiously, noted it was an old Colt Police
special, a .38, and regarded Christine Langerhaus for a moment
and then, for want of anything more dramatic to say, asked,
"Want to have a seat?"
Christine shook her head and Doris found herself shaking hers in
response. "Okay. Let's get you back to Toledo, then." Natalie
regarded the two other woman, her expression like that of a
seeing-eye dog who doesn't believe what it's seeing.
"That'll be fine," Christine said after a moment's pause and the
three women found themselves looking at each, stuck in one of
the those awkward social situations that Emily Post never
considered.
Doris didn't remember to recite Miranda rights until they were
out of the building and nearly to the squad car.
Doris drove back to Toledo with her mind revving in high gear.
From the beginning, Lilly's murder -- if murder it was, and
Doris wasn't convinced -- had the feel of a carnival house of
mirrors. Nothing was quite right. Except, of course, that Lilly
certainly had enough people who would have liked to see him
safely underground. She was mulling that over and occasionally
glancing back at her prisoner when Meg, the Toledo Dispatcher,
called.
"Doris, you need to get back here. We've had a break in the
Lilly case."
Doris grabbed the mike and muttered darkly to herself. Of
course. Had to be. "Don't tell me -- let me guess. The mayor
just turned himself in for killing Lilly."
Silence.
Then a click and what sounded like someone taking a deep breath.
"Really? Then that makes two people. The justice of the peace
just walked in and gave himself up to Mort for shooting Lilly.
You think they did it together?"
Doris snuck a look back at her prisoner, who was lost in
thought, staring out the side window. She didn't appear to have
heard. "No, Meg. No. I repeat. No. Bud did not turn himself in
-- but I do have someone who did. Has Mort read the J.P. his
rights?"
"Of course. Mort says the J.P. was being blackmailed!"
Doris risked a glance back at her passenger just in time to see
Christine's head snap around and her face turn ashen. Her eyes
were wide.
Okay, so Christine was being blackmailed, too. I bet whatever
Norm had is currently floating above Toledo in a fine black ash.
Better not let them compare notes.
"Shove the J.P. into the file room and have Mort keep everybody
away from him. I'll be there in about five minutes with who I
found behind door number 1. Under no circumstances put him in a
cell. Preston out."
Like most small towns, there were a number of positions that
didn't pay enough to keep anybody who had such bizarre needs as
three meals a day or a change of clothes. The jobs were damned
important, but the citizens expected somebody to do them because
of an overabundance of civic responsibility or underabundance of
common sense. Chickens would starve on what the City of Toledo
paid for mayor, city council, fire chief, or justice of the
peace. You can bet Doris wasn't swimming in greenbacks herself.
People still did the jobs for whatever reason. Take L. Kent
Parsons, the Justice of the Peace. To keep himself in a style
accustomed to food, Kent ran a drug store. A good half of his
business was by selling mail-order alternative medicine items,
stuff people called folk remedies thirty years ago.
Not that many places sold packaged kits for mustard plasters,
with directions printed in three colors and four languages. Very
few places had pamphlets on cupping, lancing, or the care and
off-duty feeding of leeches. The State Attorney General's Office
had only recently been able to talk Parsons into removing his
pamphlet on home trepanning and was still working on getting him
to drop the kit. (It came complete with local anesthetic, drill,
gauze, plaster, and a road map to the skull, brain, and dura
mater. It may not have been a big seller, but at the price he
got for it, he didn't _have_ to sell that many. He certainly
didn't count on repeat business for that particular item.)
To pay back the world, God, and possibly any other deities that
might have been offended, Kent worked for low pay and weird
hours as the Justice of the Peace. He sat in judgment on traffic
matters and, by arrangement with the county, set bail for minor
offenses. Even Doris had to admit he did a pretty good job on
the whole, even if she did figure he set bail awfully low.
Doris waved off any questions as she ushered Christine into the
back and got her settled in one of the three cells. As soon as
she emerged, it was to a confused gabble of questions from Meg,
Jimmy, and Mort as well as Fred Vasquez, who usually worked
night shifts. She again waved for quiet and sat down on her
desk. For a few moments she listened to their speculation and
was about to put a halt to it when the phone rang and she picked
it up without thinking. "Toledo Police, Preston."
"Doris, I think you might want to come home." Milt was speaking
precisely, in his Police Voice. It gave Doris the willies.
"Why would I want to come home right now, Milt? Aside from the
fact that it's almost quitting time and I haven't eaten."
"Well, there's a package that's been delivered -- or rather it
will be if you come and sign for it. UPS."
"Can't you? "
"No, you have to."
"Well, he'll be gone by the time I..."
"That's unlikely. I've kind of taken the driver into custody.
You really want to come home. Now."
Doris looked at the ceiling for a moment. "Judas Priest, Milt. I
really don't want you to tell me that the UPS driver has
confessed to shooting Norm Lilly. I don't think I could take
that right now."
Milt paused for a moment before answering which gave Doris a bad
moment. There was still a third shooter to account for. "Well,
no, I won't tell you that. But the box Norm Lilly sent you might
have something in it that might prove interesting."
By this time, the rest of the squad room had lapsed into silence
and stood around like a herd of disgruntled penguins waiting for
a herring handout. The side of the conversation they heard
begged for speculation. They also knew Doris would shoot anybody
who started doing so.
Doris sighed. "Okay, I'm on my way." To her onlookers, she said,
"Okay, people. Find something to do. I'll be back in a bit.
Jimmy, I want you to get Tim Thompson over here -- be
persuasive. I've got to know what he's got before we start
talking to Christine or Kent."
She had a crummy feeling Norm Lilly was having a laugh
somewhere, right about now. She was seriously thinking of using
what remained of him on Earth for target practice.
2.
----
In actual fact, Milt had merely sat the UPS driver down and
given her coffee and a donut while he wrote out a note for the
woman's supervisor. The woman's name tag, barely visible under a
shock of orange hair that crawled down her left shoulder, said
Emily. She kept one hand possessively on the package and the
other alternated between a Bridge Bakery cinnamon donut and her
coffee, all the while looking around the kitchen speculatively.
She didn't have a clue why she was being detained, but with a
cop writing an excuse, she figured it counted as a break and she
could kick back.
Doris drove up, came in the back door and surveyed the kitchen
scene before saying anything. The box under discussion was about
twelve inches long, nine wide and two inches deep. About the
size of a ream of paper. Doris sincerely hoped it wasn't.
"I'm Doris Preston. Where do I sign?"
Emily sighed and stuffed the rest of her donut into her mouth.
While chewing, she pulled out the data board and handed it to
Doris, who scrawled her name. "Thanks for waiting. You're
helping an ongoing investigation and it's appreciated."
"Can I finish my coffee?"
"Take the cup with you. We got plenty," Doris muttered as she
looked the package over. Emily lifted the cup in a salute and
left.
Doris sighed and began slitting the shipping tape on the box
with her pocketknife, all the while chewing the inside of her
cheek. "I don't suppose I need to check it over. I doubt it's a
bomb."
"Probably not. Should I go in the other room just to be safe?"
"Hell no. I go down, you go with me. That was the deal."
Milt chuckled softly and sat back. Doris favored him with a
glare and then opened up the box. Inside was a letter, lying on
top of a mass of various papers -- check stubs, credit card
receipts, hotel room receipts, you name it. "Oh, God. That son
of a bitch."
Doris knew exactly what it was. All the fixings for blackmail,
probably on half the people in town. Probably only missing
whatever evidence Christine and Kent had destroyed last night.
She looked at Milt, who found himself totally at sea. He didn't
have any of the particulars on the arrests Mort and Doris had
made that day. Doris sighed and explained.
Milt took it all in stoically enough and didn't interrupt. When
she finished, he looked thoughtful for a moment and then said,
"Lilly was a pillar of the community?" Distaste tinged each
word.
"Only insofar as he was rich and had a lot of influence."
"So what are you going to do? This is probably evidence of a
bunch of crimes."
Doris shrugged. "Right now, I'm not going to do anything but
read the bloody letter. Then I'm going to seal the box up and
hide upstairs under the bed."
"Are there a lot of unsolved crimes in Toledo?"
Doris thought for a minute and suddenly realized that she
couldn't think of more than one or two. She shook her head. Not
real crimes, stuff that really should be solved and not picayune
odds and ends that could safely be ignored, like in any small
town. But that didn't mean there weren't things in there that
nobody knew about that should be attended to. Oh, Judas. I'm
going to have to figure out what I'm going to do with it. I
think I'd rather retire and become a streetwalker. Or a bag
lady. Maybe a nun. Some order far away that doesn't allow
talking but does allow sex and husbands. Too bad I can't think
of one.
"Damn." She took a deep breath. "Listen to this."
Hello, Doris. How are things? You will be getting this
after my murder and are probably wondering just what's
going on. Well, I'll tell you. Since I've not got all
that long to live thanks to cancer, and I hurt quite a
bit, I just thought I'd spread my good fortune around
and make my passing memorable.
I'm not a popular man and I take a certain amount of
pride in that. Most people in this jerkwater town don't
have the sense God gave a gopher. They're stupid and
smug in their stupidity. They can be counted on to cheat
at pinochle, drink too much, sleep with anything that
can be talked into taking the time out, and can't
recognize people who are their obvious superiors, much
less treat them as such. So, over the last thirty years,
I've watched the idiots and taken notes until I had
something on damned near everybody of any importance.
Enough to embarrass, humiliate, and more important,
incarcerate plenty of people.
Interestingly enough, I don't have anything on my sister
or you that isn't past the statute of limitations. The
only thing I found was that night you hot-wired your
roommate's car and drove into the Willamette River. That
was after you had steam-rolled a six pack of Colt .45,
if you recall the details and I doubt that you do. The
picture of you throwing up on your roommate is
priceless... and don't bother looking, it isn't in the
box. I'm having it buried with me.
Now, as for my murder, I have a few candidates for that.
First, there's L. Kent Parsons, who I've been
blackmailing for 17 years. Then there's Christine
Langerhaus. Same story, 9 years. Finally, there's my
mother. The old bitch found out I'd skimmed 20 grand a
year off the trust Dad left her -- you can figure she's
not a big fan of mine.
Have fun. Go to town. You've got months and months of
arrests and trials and general brouhaha and I can
guarantee you're going to hate every minute.
And you'll do it. You're such a smug, sanctimonious snot
you'll do it because it's the right thing to do.
You never should have told anybody about that midget. I
really didn't have anything against you, personally,
until then.
Sincerely,
Norman Lilly, deceased.
Doris put the letter down and looked far less grim than Milt
would have expected. Even more to his astonishment, she wasn't
grinding her teeth. "You've thought of something."
Doris didn't answer immediately. She sat back and drank some
coffee, drank some more, and then looked back at Milt. "Yeah, I
did indeed. Let's wrap this up. I'm going back to the station to
talk to Jimmy and Tim Thompson. I'll leave you to clean up this
mess. When you're done, I want you to go to Newport and pick up
Alice Tromlits. If you could bring her down to the station, I
think we can get this whole thing finished tonight."
Jimmy looked peeved at the prospect of missing dinner with his
wife. Tim Thompson sat at Jimmy's desk, having his dinner, a
triple cheeseburger with everything. Meg stood with her left
hand holding the left side of the jacket high while her right
hand chased the sleeve around behind her back. At this point the
sleeve was winning. She caught Doris' expression out of the
corner of her eye and abandoned her quest. The prospect of
possibly getting an hour of overtime _while_ listening to what
was essentially gossip was not an opportunity Meg could ignore.
She found a spot out of Doris' direct line of fire.
Once seated, Doris leaned on her desk, her left hand cupping her
chin and asked, "Well, Doctor, what did you find out?"
Thompson swallowed and reluctantly put the rest of the
cheeseburger down. "Well, I'd have to say that Lilly died of a
heart attack. It was close, but I _think_ it was a heart attack
rather anything else. There's no question he was dead long
before the bullets took up residence. "
"What ran second?"
"Poison -- strychnine to be accurate. There was a large dose in
his stomach that he'd only started to digest. Just traces in the
blood." He looked thoughtful and then made a face halfway
between astonishment and bemusement. "He drank it in some coffee
-- and I use the term loosely. Jimmy found the coffee cup, and
the stuff in it didn't pour so much as crawl. Maybe the shock of
that hitting his stomach triggered the coronary."
"You think?"
"Nope." He went back to eating.
"Okay. How about morphine? Did he have any in him?"
"No, now that you mention it. Surprised me a bit. I would have
thought he was in considerable pain from the condition of his
internal organs."
"So we have a death by natural causes, one case of attempted
poisoning and three cases of corpse shooting. That's more or
less what I figured."
All three looked at Doris questioningly. Thompson didn't know
Doris well enough to draw a conclusion from her statement, but
Jimmy and Meg did -- their expressions hammered on Doris like
Alaskan mosquitoes who've sighted their first meal of the
spring. She ignored them.
"Jimmy, kick both Christine and the J.P. free on their own
recognizance. Tell 'em the usual `don't leave town' hype, but
add that I want to see both of them tomorrow afternoon -- about
two o'clock. OK?"
"Aren't you going to question them?" Jimmy asked.
Doris shrugged. "I doubt if they have anything important to tell
us. Whoever poisoned Lilly might, but not them. All three
shooters can't even be considered accessories after the fact; I
don't plan to bring that charge against them." Doris looked at
Meg who met her glance stoically, expecting to be forced to quit
the scene before anything interesting happened.
Doris surprised her. "Meg, stick around for another hour or so.
The only two people I want to talk to are Milt and Alice
Tromlits. Anybody else, screen out for the next hour. I'll be
working on writing some stuff up -- "
The phone rang, barely beating the front door opening. Meg
jumped for the phone and Doris found herself looking at two
women -- Alice Tromlits and her mother, Matilda Lilly. Matty to
her friends, had she any, which she didn't.
Matilda Lilly was pushing 85, but unlike a number of the seniors
in town, she didn't look like she got any enjoyment out of
straight-arming the Grim Reaper. With her grim expression,
narrowed black eyes in a pasty Grandma Moses/Apple Doll face,
she looked like she'd much rather kick the Reaper in the nuts
and have done with it. The woman radiated bitterness like a
working smithy radiated heat. Doris could tell where Norm came
by his spitefulness; hi-test malevolence that potent rides DNA
like a tick rides a rabbit.
Before Doris could so much as mutter "Oh, jeez," Matty started
in.
"Just who the hell do you think you are, you little puffed up
bitch? Rousting my daughter around like some cheap streetwalker
-- not that the idiot doesn't need rousting, but I'll do it, not
some jackass woman cop who..." Matty stopped rather suddenly in
mid-tirade.
It was the cold gray eyes boring into her that did it. That and
the twitch of Doris's right hand which plainly showed the hand's
desire for the close companionship of a gun. Matilda Lilly may
not have been much of a reader of the printed word, but she
certainly qualified as a speed reader of physical text.
Doris looked mildly disappointed. She glanced at Alice
questioningly.
"My mother got a little upset when I mentioned you had a talk
with me this afternoon." Alice shrugged.
"Really? Pity." Doris looked back at the old woman and then
pointedly looked at a chair a comfortable distance away. "Shut
up and sit down. If you interrupt me just once, I'll throw you
in a cell and have somebody hose you down. That is, unless you
want to confess to shooting your son. He seemed to think you
planned to."
Matilda pursed her lips tightly and remained mum.
"No matter." Doris turned back to Alice and waited while the
other sat down in the chair beside her desk. Without preamble,
she asked, "How in hell did you get him to drink that coffee?
Couldn't he taste the poison? Besides, I would have thought he'd
refuse to take a chance on anything you'd give him."
Alice smiled slightly. "By that time, he didn't really care what
I had in it."
Doris looked thoughtful. "What did you do with his morphine?"
"Flushed it."
"Really? What actually _was_ in the prescription bottle?
Remember, we can have it analyzed."
"I put some old saccharine tablets in it. I figured he wouldn't
notice."
"Did you know he was setting things up to have somebody kill
him?"
Alice sighed and nodded as she crossed her legs. Without asking
permission she lit up a Lucky Strike and took a big drag.
Her mother looked astonished. "You killed him?" From the tone of
voice, Doris couldn't tell if Matty approved or heartily
approved.
"I sure as hell _tried_. His damned will saddles me with the
trust for you and more liens on the estate than you can count on
your fingers and toes. On top of it all, the bastard left me
just enough money to make sure I'd have to pay taxes on it. I'm
going to lose everything to lawyers. Prison's starting to sound
pleasant after fifty years of the two of you."
Doris sat back in her chair and casually asked, "How did you get
Christine, Kent, and..." Alice favored her with a chill look and
didn't finish the list. "...and the rest to actually shoot a
dead man?"
Alice snorted. "Norm always did have a problem with overkill. He
didn't know which of the three would crack and he didn't care.
He just wanted out."
"And when Christine showed up..."
"Before, actually. I gave them all a call and told them they
could get out from under Norm's thumb _without_ killing him. I
had to sweeten the deal, I'm afraid. I ended up giving them each
$2,000 on top of the original blackmail evidence."
"Did you really think we'd miss the fact that he was already
dead when he was shot?"
Alice looked disgusted for a moment and then shrugged. "I didn't
think of that until after Christine shot him. Only then did I
realize he didn't bleed."
"Well, brighten up. You don't have to worry about a murder
charge. The autopsy pegged the cause of death as a heart
attack." Alice looked mildly surprised.
Meg cupped the phone she held and called to Doris. "It's Milt.
He says Alice Tromlits's house is burning down."
"Oh, that's just ducky." Doris glared at Alice. "You set it,
didn't you?"
The other woman nodded. "Hell, yes. I own it outright and I
mailed a registered letter to my insurance company informing
them I'd torched it. After our little talk, I knew you weren't
buying the idea Norm had been blown away, and knowing my brother
only too well, I figured he'd planted lots of evidence in my
house."
"Evidence of what?" Doris asked, more to herself than to Alice.
Alice favored her with a withering look and with the merest hint
of a smile, said, "Don't be silly. I'm not going to answer
_that_."
Par for the course. Asking a Lilly for cooperation was nearly as
pointless as eating celery. The entire Lilly family seemed to
have a talent for making life miserable for just about anybody
within a blast radius of at least 7 miles -- that being
approximately how far away Alice's house stood, or smoldered, as
the case might be.
Milt got home about two hours later, smelling of smoke and
bearing evidence of unwilling participation in crowd activities.
Getting melted marshmallows out of a police jacket isn't easy,
which explained his tight expression. A dark smudge under his
jaw completed the picture and gave him a raffish air he normally
didn't carry.
He doffed his jacket and hung it up, put away his other cop
gear, and then ran a hand through his crew cut: one very long
day. Maybe not as filled with revelations as Doris's, but a day
that could have benefited from less activity. Lots less
activity.
And the day was not yet done, he could see.
Doris sat on the fireplace hearth, warming her hands over a
small fire she'd built using what little dry wood they had
remaining this long after winter. Crackles and pops and an
occasional hiss drifted out of the fireplace reluctantly, as if
the hot smoke had tried to suck the sound up the chimney as it
made its escape. As he approached, he watched Doris reach into a
sack, rummage around and extract some paper, which she promptly
stuffed under the one big piece of wood in the fireplace.
Milt dared it to remain unburned. Only a piece of wood would be
stupid enough to go one on one with Doris right now. He sat down
in the recliner and leaned back. He sighed. He waited.
He got bored. She wasn't going to tell him what she was doing
and he really, really didn't want to ask straight out. At least
she'd found the box under the bed upstairs where he'd placed it,
as her sub-ether spousal telepathy had directed. She knew he
wouldn't get rid of it. He just _couldn't_.
Hide it, yes. Forget about it, damned right. Destroy possible
evidence? No way.
Doris was a hell of a lot more pragmatic than he was -- always
had been. He'd seen that the night he'd first determined that
Doris was as serious about him as he was about her. The subject
had been blackmail then, too.
She looked at him, gave him a tight grin, fished around and
grabbed a handful of paper.
"You sure, absolutely sure, that you want to do that?"
Doris simply nodded.
"Did you read any of it -- I mean, you had to have looked at
some of it."
Doris shook her head. She still didn't say anything. Lord, he
hated it when she needled him like this. Milt's curiosity bump
was very nearly as big as he was.
He couldn't stand it. "Dammit, Doris. Say something. Say
anything. Don't just sit there."
"I'm not. I'm feeding a fire." She grabbed another handful and
stuffed it into a convenient location between a piece of
two-by-four and the log. She watched if for a second. "How did
your fire go?"
Milt sighed. "Total loss."
"Did you know Alice set it?"
Milt looked thunderstruck and then morphed to perplexed. "Alice
was at the station? "
"She showed up with Mummy Dearest and confessed to poisoning
Norm and torching her place. By now Fred has her over in the
county lock-up but I think she'll get sprung as soon as the D.A.
looks at the particulars in the case. I can't feature anybody
prosecuting her. I can think of a number of people who might
even applaud her."
"So why did you have her locked up?"
"To make damned sure that Alice didn't off Mummy or vice versa.
I'm hoping by tomorrow morning that the two of them have cooled
off enough to resume their normal, probably sick, family
relationship."
Milt took a deep breath, assimilating things at a quicker rate
than most people would have expected. He caught his mental
breath and then asked _the_ question. "Why?"
"Why what? Why am I dumping the entire case into the nearest
facility that won't chuck it back up at me? Because there _is_
no case. Attempted murder is the worst we could go for and I
think a smart lawyer could convince a jury it was just a case of
mercy attempted murder. Corpse desecration? How can I go for
that when _I_ want to do things to Lilly's corpse myself? And if
any of the particulars come out, you bet half the town will feel
that way too.
"How can I burn Norm's _evidence_? How the hell can I _not_ burn
it? It's about as close to a pure act of evil as anything I've
ever seen."
"But evidence?"
"Evidence of what? And when does it actually become evidence of
other crimes? The way I see it, only after somebody reads it.
Nobody but Norm knew what was in there. He's gone. Ipso facto,
it's not evidence. Not the way I see it."
Milt swore softly to himself. "That's convenient -- and that's
sophistry."
Doris grinned. "You know that. I know that. But I don't think
the paper knows that." She shoved the rest of the sack into the
fireplace, watched until it caught fire and then went over and
sat in Milt's lap. She looked at Milt, gave him a quick kiss on
the forehead and then looked back at the fire.
"God, I hope that somewhere, somehow, good old Norm knows just
how _warm_ his little gift has made me feel."
"Not possible."
"Don't count on it, Milt. If there is any justice, anywhere,
ever, he will."
The fire flared up, a sheet of yellow that blocked out the
soot-black behind it as is danced and spun and reached for the
sky beyond the chimney. The log caught and the crackle of pitch
pockets chuckled softly to the night.
For a very long time -- an eternity, perhaps.
T.G. Browning (tgbrowning@navicom.com)
----------------------------------------
T.G. Browning is a traffic engineer in Oregon and has had
several stories published via the web, although he generally
spends his time writing novels. His first novel, Wired, is
scheduled to be published this fall. He writes a column for
the e-zine Dark Moon Rising on book collecting.
=====
FYI
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